Meta Threads engagement has dropped 50% in a week

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

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

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

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

"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...

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.

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.

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.

Permanently Deleted

There never was engagement, everyone just downloaded the app, checked it out, then bounced.

well everyone downloaded it to get their usernames

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

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.

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.

I wonder why.

Permanently Deleted

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The honeymoon phase is reaching its end

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.

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

Flash in the pan. Replacing Twitter won’t happen with Facebook clones.

Well, yeah. It was the cool new thing, now it isn't.

Probably because it's a complete mess. I joined as I was curious and don't really care if I have to delete my Instagram account to get rid of my Threads account. You follow people and then barely see their updates.

This is expected? New service, people flock, it's not for everyone that flocked, buzz dies down

I'll stick with Mastodon in any case

Mobile only is a no-go for me. Sorry Zuck.

Will it go the way of Clubhouse (remember that one?)? 🤔

Womp Womp

Good

It will prabably go back once Elon does his next thing and or the work out some QOL problems.

Shocking news

Give it a home feed that isn't solely algorithmically driven and it'll be back.

A flood of brands I can't opt out of--I gotta mute/block each of them individually--no bookmarks or drafts for Threads I might like to come back to, no fuckin' gifs, mobile only, de-prioritization of news...

Tbh it's just kinda lame.

Maybe those 10 Million new subscribers were just bots.

Just like twitter rose to prominence as being one stolen feature of facebook (that being the contemporary facebook’s “status”), Meta must pull a single feature from its long-dead predecessors. I demand platform where you list 6 of the people you know from Most favorite to Least, the top three being Tom, Air-humping Storm Trooper and Tila Tequila. That is the only thing that can undo the unknown energies of the Blue Bird,

I think a big part of the initial explosive growth was due to ease of access. Almost everybody has an instagram account, and that made it really easy for people to just “check out” threads. I’m not surprised that a lot of people didn’t end up sticking around.

I found it terribly boring. It felt like twitter but with much less functionality.

It's like movie companies boasting "BIGGEST GROSSING MOVIE OF THE SUMMER"

Yea but your Rotten Tomatoes score is, like, 10 Lol

Someone accidentally shutdown the bot farm

And half of movement there is just bots reposting shit from twitter. Indeed great success.

The impression I got from Threads is it was all the ads and brands of twitter without the actual people.

Permanently Deleted

Do they count account creation as engagement? I suppose it was only engagement for people there

Expected. They haven't added lots of essential features yet so it doesn't even have anywhere near feature parity with Twitter, making it more pleasant and useful for people to Twitter.

It was alright I guess the first week, but really the big part that interested me was the Fediverse, and I really do hope people jump off Threads to come use other platforms.

Some might not and I wish Meta goes by there work and does Fediverise to allow those users to use the wider Fediverse

Not surprising. People use what they know, and people use what other people use. I'm sticking around on Lemmy, though.

Everyone's lurking now.

not too surprised. this happens with platforms like there where there's a surge of initial interest and then it dies down to the people that will actually use it. it'll either stagnate and die like most google social products, or it'll start to grow and users will generate content that others want to see.

Of course everything will “calm down” in due time, some after then others.

Once the FOMO of this wears off I still think Twitter will reign supreme (not that I care for either just saying)

Both can co exists it’s not always about who has the most users or engagement crap that gets thrown around now a days.

I tried it at first too, and haven’t been on in a couple days. No Trending view and no hashtags makes it not very useful as a social network, and the novelty of text based Instagram posts wore off really quickly.

Another one bites the dust

Threads just needs to add more features. It's pretty bare bones right now and has a lot of room for improvements especially comparing it to Twitter. Once they do that I think it will be easier for them to retain users.

Now that people are getting paid monetizing their Blue checked Twitter account Threads is going to become a other Google+ with old people.

Back to Twitter.....