Facebook's "Threads" has lost more than half of its users

I love how everyone still calls them Facebook. It's the simple things.

Nothing makes me happier than deadnaming a corporation
- 🍗 (The Bird Formerly Known As Twitter)
- I dont care how long it has been or how persistent you are. It's fucking Comcast Xfinity sounds like the subtitle to a terrible Sci-fi movie from the 80s
- "You'll always be Union Carbide to me"
This highlights how deep the BS surrounding Musk has burrowed into the media scape. They invariably refer to his companies as "Elon Musks Tesla" or "Elon Musks Twitter" and so on. Where other billionaire's (for the most part) avoid the limelight and their companies stand seperate to their idiotic personal choices.
- I am Elon Musk's throbbing need for attention.
- I say “Elon Musk’s Twitter” like would I say “Joel Schumacher’s Batman” — to identify it as the worst version of the thing.
Lol the tweet I found this article from referred to it as Meta. nah.
- I like how you still call it a tweet. I hope tweet, tweeting and twitter remain the lexicon for X forever.
- Yeah but you posted it as Facebook. You're doing good.
the local telephone service here has seen several owners and even more name changes in the last couple decades. i still call it by the company name it had in the 90s.
- Stadiums get like too.
  
  Going to catch the game at the T-Moble Samsung SL17 this weekend?
  Uhh
Just like X will never replace Twitter. That was a weird rebranding tbh. Meta at least makes some sense.
- That's because Zuckerberg is actually a smart guy. He may be a prick and an asshole and possibly not human, but you really can't deny he is smart.
  
  Musk is an immature idiot with money.

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!

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?
- 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.
Engagement is down to 6 minutes per user per day down from 21 minutes at launch.

For perspective Twitter is at 34.8 minutes per user per day.
- I wonder what Lemmy is....

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 ~~Twitter~~ X

Plenty of cute animals though.

A different half than the half lost weeks ago?

Another half.

Threads use is down to about 6 minutes a day — plummeting from 21 minutes when it first launched. (Per user/per day)

Edit: For perspective, Twitter is at 34 mins, Facebook at 30 mins.
- 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

Are the other half government bots and fbi agents?

Permanently Deleted

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.

Now it simply bots... Like reddit and more and more here...

I was thinking the same thing! Put couple bots and say evet goes perfect!

Permanently Deleted

It is no different than a Twitter version of Instagram...

Full of celebrities and influences.

And these people has no privacy right at all, they literally sell their life.

🥲 🥲 🥲 🥲

If their fediverse plan goes according to plan (did I just rhyme that?), then I might see some more potential in using Threads. Maybe I can also get rid of my Mastodon account because I literally don't use it anymore (I can't get rid of my Threads account without also getting rid of my Instagram account. It's both or nothing)