In other predictable news, Threads has lost half of its daily active users a week after launch.
From 49 million daily actives to 23.6 million. In one week.
https://twitter.com/adadithya/status/1681161634327445506?t=G3pzNwl-lrdCjinZm-sX-A&s=19
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I check threads at least as much as Twitter. It’s very much in early beta phase and can’t even be used on a desktop. There’s no trending, no search, and the news feed is basic. It will get better and Twitter will get worse and in like 18 months Threads will be larger.
I disagree unless Zuck makes major changes to make it a virtual Twitter clone. In the end I think lots of people will try it but in the end they’ll maybe shave 10% off Twitter’s current user base, mostly people who were dying for a reason to jump ship anyway. Some percentage will start splitting their time between them too, I’m sure.
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It’s really basic right now, I don’t see the point of the exercise if they don’t improve it, just to win a week’s worth of good press and then fade to black?
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The head of Threads has indicated that they have a lot of plans to upgrade its functionality and that this is just a minimal product to go live. It took Twitter a few years to get decently good. I think Threads will take over because tweets that boost paid blue check replies are unreadable. It’s like the dumbest people alive.
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I don’t have a 100 billion dollars and don’t run the world’s biggest social media empire, but it feels like they could have done more to capitalize on the initial interest rather than push an MVP they could probably have tested in house. I’m already seeing a bunch of newsy accounts with a few posts initially, that are now silent, and their most recent and content filled posts continue to be on twitter. I know threads will improve and it stands some chance at being a viable alternative down the road, but it seems like they could have really killed twitter in one blow if they had two or three key features that most people were probably expecting.
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I think she usually (always?) posts blog post versions of her youtubes, basically just the transcript. Would reading the youtube video be better?
Fwiw I like Sabine a lot but am probably not quite as positive as Devil is. I think her criticism often sounds interesting, but would be interested in hearing some rebuttals too (like in the case of why modern particle physicists suck and don’t do real science etc), which I haven’t really been searching out.
it is much easier, cheaper and less risky to scale a basic twitter clone and add features then it is to release a fully featured one from the start. Partly because they lack the data to test these features on. I expect Meta can roll out new features pretty quickly now that they have real life data to work with.
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I haven’t followed the particle physics debate all that closely because in the end, I’m not qualified to judge. If they can raise enough money to build a muon collider or whatever they want next, I’m fine with it. IMO it’s better to spend on that than sending people to Mars. And anyway it’s not really a zero sum game.
From a little exposure to academia, what Sabine says about motivations certainly seems plausible. You could see a kind of debate on twitter when the video posted above came out. But that was mostly just people being jerks. There were some sprinkles of arguments and pointers to things off twitter that maybe explained the other side better. They shouldn’t be hard to find. Sabine has participated in debates like this one that included John Ellis (40 minute video):
https://iai.tv/video/the-mystery-of-reality?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description
Her books are mostly organized around interviews she’s conducted with other physicists/scientists and Lost in Math has some stuff in it about particle physics so there may be some of the other side there. (I haven’t listened to it yet.)
I agree that’s appropriate for almost all software projects, but here they’re mostly knocking something off, and stuff like having a view to see the list of people you follow should have been part of the mvp, that’s basic. Hashtags/trending topics, meh, I guess I could see rolling that out separately but still a fundamental component of the service I would think.
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I understand you been having some problems. For a nominal monthly fee, my organization can handle all your security needs. Then you got no more problems. Capisce?
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The writers of this timeline have really jumped the shark. I guess full shark would be changing it to a swastika.
Onion
You got Xed! Twitter corrections things can be called X Ed.
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x thing has got to be spite. twitter is such a well-known brand, that’s what he paid for, is the name and the bird. and to just replace it with an x is consistent with my view that he’s been purposely destroying twitter because he’s mad at unions for organizing on twitter and then he got mad at the lawyers for forcing him to spend 40 billion based on an offhand remark he made while high on ketamine
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