this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 321 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Typical fear of missing out behavior. Folks flock to Threads to see what it's all about, see that it actually sucks, and bail.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah FOMO is a helluva drug. I'd be willing to bet that while there are plenty of users on the newplaform, people actually posting is not there yet, and with the lack of content for users to doom scroll they're hopping back to whatever app they came from. Most people don't give two shits about actually engaging with a given userbase, they just want to doom scroll content and zone out.

[–] Tag365 28 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Why did they start calling it "Doom scrolling?"

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's generally when you're stuck in a loop of reading negative posts/articles. I think the phenomenon comes from how when you read a negative article/piece of news you feel down, so you want to scroll further in the hopes of seeing something positive to lift your spirits. But then of course it's only more negativity, and so you keep going. And the algorithms of Twitter/Facebook knows this, so they don't tend to help you find something positive.

[–] another_lemming 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nothing positive is needed. It's an outrage engine that keeps you involved by edging on the max level of disturbance you are comfortable to consume. Seeing, posting reactions, having likes enables you to keep it going.

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[–] collinrs 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wouldn't say its FOMO, I think most people just had higher hopes for it as a direct Twitter replacement instead of the cesspool of reposters, uninteresting celebs, and wylin' out social media managers that it serves up in its feed. I don't mind Meta, I don't mind that they want to eventually federate, I just wish the feed wasn't pure trash.

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[–] Razzmadazz 156 points 1 year ago (6 children)

In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week

Don't fact check me I pulled this out my ass

[–] THRVLDSN 33 points 1 year ago

Fact checked. Your ass contents appear to be statistically correct.

[–] EdibleFriend 28 points 1 year ago

I checked his ass. It indeed is empty now so he did recently pull something out.

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[–] PineapplePartisan 132 points 1 year ago (4 children)

They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (8 children)

What new personal information did meta get from Instagram users enabling threads?

[–] saegiru 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The real answer is nothing, assuming they already had an Instagram account. People are all up in arms, but the majority of 'signups' were just people clicking the activation button as opposed to creating a new account.

That said, I currently will praise anything that takes more users away from Twitter. Lesser of two evils and all that.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Not that I disagree much, but... what a world we live in where Meta is the lesser of two evils...

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[–] krigo666 120 points 1 year ago (13 children)

"Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days."

LOL The biggest bullshit of the year... Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent...

[–] Shadesto 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

100 million isn't that much when it comes to Meta. There's over 2 billion "active" Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.

I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Your maths is a little off there: 100m is 5%

[–] Shadesto 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IT'S JUST A FEW DECIMAL PLACES GIVE ME A BREAK 😆

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[–] MargotRobbie 76 points 1 year ago (13 children)

It's Google Plus all over again.

If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don't like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.

It feels like the same reason that Reels isn't doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can't force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I mean, to be honest, I feel like it's the quality of the content in there. I used my old phone (the one I use for apps like threads) to get a threads account and people are using Threads as if they're using instagram.

For example, you see a pocture of someone or a drawing, you get into the post to see the 45 comments people left and all of them are:

Comment #1: "Magnificent 🥰😍" #2: "Amazing 🤩" #3: "WOW!! 🔥🔥"

And so on.

At least in twitter there is more "discussion" (albeit toxic and usually useless) or at least more people sometimes talking about interesting things.

[–] dinckelman 31 points 1 year ago

That's pretty much exactly what I expected. Instagram is exactly like this. Filled to the brim with fake engagement, bots, and an occasional real person account, who also happens to be doing things that horribly affect people's mental health

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

strange. my "engagement" on lemmy is... "all day". strange indeed.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Maybe because we "care for each others" opinions. The weird thing about converting instagram users automatically to thread users is, that instagram is mostly a one-to-many communication. One Insta Model posting her newest picture and then thousand others comment and like it. Thread (and Lemmy) are more back and forth and commenting on comments. That means we have an active dialogue where things are discussed in a more natural way. The Insta model does not give a shit about a bi-directional communication with their followers. They prefer a mostly one way communication of send and receive (like or die). They don't really care for their followers opinions and certainly are not interested in a deeper dialogue with them. They want to expand their reach and likes first of all. Threads is very different in the interaction than instagram.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

well everyone downloaded it to get their usernames

[–] RhetoricalOrator 22 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I haven't, but thats actually surprising. Back in 2001 someone had my name for their Yahoo email (it's an unusual but common one) and decided then that I wouldn't let it happen again.

For the next few years, I would immediately register for everything that looked like I would use it.

Got a good Hotmail in the 90s. But later on I would register for every little thing like Hushmail. Shushmail. Then MySpace. The best, though, was when I managed to get an invite in late 2007 for a little email service provider that was called Gmail.

Suck it every other variation of [email protected]!

(Not my actual email.)

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[–] decadentrebel 46 points 1 year ago

I'm one of the many who deactivated not too long after it launched. My dashboard was just being filled with so many users (mostly celebrities and influencers) who I don't recall ever following or even being on my sphere of interest. It doesn't help that their posts are inorganic attempts to spur engagement.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No hashtags, no anonymity…. Threads has no purpose and is likely to fail unless this changes

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the issue with the new "own nothing, subscription only" and "if you're not the customer, you're the product" type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.

All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that's really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (6 children)
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[–] Dogs_cant_look_up 31 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Is it because it's filled to the brim with old memes? That would make me want to leave a new place. Tried kbin social the other day and the first three pages were all full of the old memes being posted here and i spent half an hour or so trying to figure out how to filter them out but couldn't so I just uninstalled.

[–] Ghostalmedia 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Lol I feel like [email protected] polluted a lot of the internet lately.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Reminds me of the old saying: "how do you make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with a billion"

Start with a billion visitors, then snag 100 million, then keep 1 million then blaghole the site

[–] drmoose 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They launched it without addressing the obvious issues like spam and low-quality content. The easy migration from Instagram basically turned threads into... Instragram. Literally the same low quality posts and low quality engagement of Instagram transfered over. Seriously, have you ever read comments on Instagram? It's the bottom of the barrel in the every sense of the expression. That's Threads now.

Also, poetically threads on Threads are even harder to follow and navigate than Twitter.

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[–] notannpc 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I played around with it and it’s basically useless without a follower only feed. And the posts tend to just basically disappear forever after a feed refresh.

But if they follow through on ActivityPub integration I’ll be stoked to follow all the normies that couldn’t get by on mastodon that are using threads. More content = more better.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I won't be happy if they integrate federation. Ever heard the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's a tactic used by large companies to squash growing competition.

Google used it, for example, to squash a growing open-source chat messenger protocol called XMPP. (Think of XMPP like ActivityPub.) Google allowed its Google Talk application to integrate with people using XMPP. (They embraced XMPP.)

Then, they added their own proprietary features that wouldn't work with normal XMPP users. (They extended, or built on top of, XMPP.)

Then, they cut support for XMPP integration, leaving it effectively dead in the water. XMPP users suddenly had a list of Google Talk users in their friend list who would never appear online again, whereas Google Talk users maybe had one or two people in their friend list who looked like they'd moved on from Google Talk. (They extinguished XMPP.)

Now imagine that happening with Threads. You, a Mastodon user, follow a bunch of people who just happen to be on Threads. There are some things Threads users can do that you can't, but you don't really mind. It works well enough. Then, one day, Threads stops working with Mastodon. Suddenly, over half of the people you followed are no longer available to you. The only way you can follow them again... is to join Threads.

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[–] crowsby 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of "Twitter, but fewer nazis", so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.

I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it's only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Doesn't seem surprising. It's the new shiny thing and then interest wanes a bit. Probably same holds true of Lemmy IMO. That said Threads is now a viable replacement for Twitter and advertisers might decide one platform is a toxic cesspit and the other isn't (and has some big crossover influencers) and spend accordingly. Even if it only hurts Twitter by a few % of revenue, that still more losses for Musk's ego purchase and it should be seen as a good thing.

Threads is allegedly going to support ActivityPub so theoretically itself and Mastodon, and Lemmy could all have some kind of federated access to each other. But Threads is an enormous whale in a pond of minows so how that would work is anyone's guess.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the novelty of it will fizzle out. Some will call it their new home. Others will go back to Twitter or other. Some will check back in periodically.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The honeymoon phase is reaching its end

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[–] Gradually_Adjusting 21 points 1 year ago

Unoriginal Social Media Gimmicks - The next big thing, or just another flash in the pan?

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