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.

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.
- Why did they start calling it "Doom scrolling?"
- I also think that there were linch pins with in the threads app, people followed shadow accounts for there friends etc. Now I wouldn't be surprised if alot of those friends then didn't get the app, making said shadow follow pointless
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.
- All the celeb shit is the number 1 reason I always hated these platforms. I also feel like the only people somewhat defending twitter are those with a large following/celebrity status
- That could be I guess.
What you described isn't FOMO, that's just curiosity. Just checking out a new popular app and then just not using it due to a lack of engagement.

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

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

Fact checked. Your ass contents appear to be statistically correct.
I checked his ass. It indeed is empty now so he did recently pull something out.
I choose to believe this. Have a good day.
that's some serious ~~good-ass news~~ good ass-news
- Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/37/
lemmy doesn't have this kind of data because we don't have the zucc in our asses.

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

What new personal information did meta get from Instagram users enabling threads?
- 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.
- I'm going to assume not all new users were Instagram users.
- Health history and fitness status
- Also Facebook
I feel like what you're talking about is complaining about someone taking a dump on another, much larger pile of crap.

If you were already on Instagram that ship has sailed.
At least, they entertained me during a week or so.
They got nothing new. Just a few shitposts from Instagram users saying “I’m on Threads.”

"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...

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.
- Your maths is a little off there: 100m is 5%
- Eh... Check your math...
- where have you found 2x10^12 people
Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?
- people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.
- I saw this in browser: You can go the person Instagram account and see if they have a thread logo next to it.
Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are
Not to mention all the spam bots they fail to actually ban after multiple people report.
- Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it's bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator AI teams
Wasn't it announced to be the case? So it's "just" without consent, which is already bad enough.

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.

Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example ...

The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next "social media" attempt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy

As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement's privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
- IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to "join a group".
  
  I don't think people understood it well, though.
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'm never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn't really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don't share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can't stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
- All social media based in the U.S. share information to the three letter agency, confirmed by the NSA leaks.
- Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven't been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you've previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
- Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn't care much about what data the CCP has on you.
  
  Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
  
  Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so... Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB...
- lol dumbest post i read on this site this week. log off and seek therapy

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.

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
I guess it turns out that when you pretty much automatically port over so the Instagram users they treat it like Instagram.
toxic and useless dont really summarize it imo- last few times I went there the top 10-15 comments were just screaming right wingers yelling about a conspiracy of some sort no matter what the topic is
- Looking in the replies of any new scientific discovery is infuriating, they're all spouting inane shit about how "science changed its story, so it has no credibility, this is proof that the earth is flat and 6000 years old."
the only reason it has any users is that it gave some fakeout on insta UI that your friends were talking about you on threads and, as per Meta usual, it was all bullshit. typical zuccing egotism for his upcoming cagematch.

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.

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.
- This is the problem I've always had with instragram. For a while I was storing certain pictures on there only because it seemed like a good place to store them that I could share with people if the time ever came for that (it didn't). The engagement side of things looked very slim.
- absolutely. I am in search of peers, not influncers.
  
  I would suspect that most of us on discussion board style platforms (and lemmy in particular) want peer engagement - something that is building quite nicely on lemmy.
- This is a good point. It makes me wonder if maybe "engagement" isn't going to be a metric for whether Threads succeeds or fails. (Other things I have read suggests that it's hot garbage in ways other than lack of dialogue, so I still think people are dropping it, but they might be able to fix those things).
I tried it, because I still have a Facebook account I barely used.

I got like two screens of people I subscribed to and after they are out of new posts the platform tries to push a bunch of popular influencers and brands that I couldn't care less about. They couldn't get me to close it faster if they tried.
W

well everyone downloaded it to get their usernames

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 RhetoricalOrator@gmail.com!

(Not my actual email.)
- I got firstlastname on Gmail and I find it a curse now. There are old people all over the place with the same name that simply can't remember their email address and end up using mine. I have had everything from non profit fun runs in North Carolina to aerial crop photos from Idaho that apparently farmers pay for? It was like a $100 a month service... . Luckily I use first.lastname so I can filter out their emails quickly since they never have the . Occasionally when it's an email from a small company or something like that i send responses but most of it I just junk now.
- This is me too, including every janky MMO I think I might remotely like. Gotta grab my character name. But Threads, haven't bothered to touch it.
- That's why I believe that the username crisis is real. Future generations won't have short usernames and will have to use increasingly longer usernames to have a unique one, or have a Redditesque default [word1][word2][4numbers].
  
  We might as well just go all out and just have everyone use a UUID with minimal chances of username collision.
Old comment by this time, but their usernames are tied to their Instagram account, correct? So there wasn't much, "securing their name" From that angle.

I couldn't personally say as it's not available in Europe.

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

no anonymity

I doubt that Instagram users who willingly install an another app made by Facebook care about that lol
- They want anonymity from relatives/friends. Most people don't care much about advertisers knowing their interests.

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.

Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.

And they can't delete their account without deleting their Instagram while also sending their phone's data, including health data, to Meta.

I wonder why.

Anyone signing up for a new Meta account isn't going to be suddenly surprised at how invasive it is. The people who signed up for Threads obviously don't give a shit about privacy, as much as I'd like to think otherwise.
- I've had this conversation many times, and they always say something like "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care", to which I respond with "I have to hide, either, but nothing I want to share. Since you have nothing to hide and you don't care, what's your bank account number, tax ID number, credentials, etc. etc. I won't use it for anything bad, promise."
  
  They still don't get it....
- Especially since there's over 2 BILLION Instagram users. Why would anyone who uses Instagram have any concerns with Threads?
This is absolutely not a concern for 99% of people. As much as we (rightfully) scream about it on Lemmy and Mastodon, most people don't care.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others are already collecting this information already, it's so strange to see people acting like this is a new phenomenon.
- We've been training AI models since picture based captchas.
Side question: what client is that? It looks amazing
- I think it's "Connect for Lemmy"

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.

Lol I feel like !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world polluted a lot of the internet lately.
- Look i'm not that much of a curmudgeon that i begrudge people enjoying themselves and getting along, I just need to be able to easily filter content i have no interest in, memes/macros being one of those. I'm still accessing lemmy through mobile browser and can skim past all that quite easily on here, but kbin blew every image up automatically and it was 90% of the content and i couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
Yeah there was some boring fucking trend going around where people posted 10 year old memes. I had to block four or five communities to have a usable lemmy experience.

In some ways this whole thing feels like WoW classic. A lot of people trying to relive the internet of their youth, while not realizing things weren't actually that great back then either. I can haz cheesburger? What the fuck were we thinking.
- To me that all felt very much like a Reddit thing. Somebody made a joke about that about posting old memes that was MAYBE mildly amusing, then everybody went ahead and killed the horse before beating it for 24 hours.
- Agreed. These "trends" that last for a couple of days before switching to the next one are stupid. People just start spamming old shitty content only because everyone else is too. It definitely makes Lemmy more active but getting my feed filled with low effort shitposts is not the kind of activity I'm looking for. I've been here for a month and I've already blocked more users/communities than I ever did on reddit.
- We were younger. There's no shame in being young, and liking things then that seem stupid now.

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

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.

Isnt instagram primarily used for.... pictures and images? I seen comments the times i have used it - the comments are generally very low quality and low brow.
- I think both of your points are correct but a lot of celebrity types write straight up essays attached to some of their pictures - it's like where they get out everything they can't fit into 280 characters.

The honeymoon phase is reaching its end

Same with Lemmy. Active users seems to be stalling
- Not a bad thing if true. I'd prefer a slow and steady growth. Let the more dedicated people among us build a stable foundation, then people will switch organically. I almost feel bad for being here in some sense because I have a very general understanding of how Lemmy even works.
  
  I know that it's open-source and decentralized, but I struggled/struggle to understand what instances are, what communities are which, what server I joined, how communities are moderated and where to find rules...etc. I really want to gain traction in regional team subs with game day threads for Lemmy, but I have no idea how to code a bot to post them automatically with auto updating game info and stats.
- Because Lemmy top topic before are only talking about Reddit, and people love talk about it since api contro. Now since Reddit hype are down, people start to think how to make Lemmy topic different and somewhat great than on Reddit I think.. So, it takes time to see the average Lemmy users activity..
If they all came from Instagram, or is used to how Instagram is, I'm not suprised this happens. People use Insta for likes only, not comments/discussions. Sadly.
Nope. I'm here

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.

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.

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.

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.
- ActivityPub is open source. This means, by definition, Meta are allowed to use it. They could easily do the extinguish part by just never using the protocol. If another platform existing is such a threat to the Fediverse then we're doomed to failure in the first place.
  
  While Google removing XMPP no doubt helped sink nails into the coffin, WhatsApp played a bigger role in the death of XMPP than Google removing it from Talk. It was increasingly irrelevant for a now growing number of people.

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

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.

Social networks that end up being successful have a long initial growth phase. Interest waning after a couple of days is a terrible sign. Threads is already dead.
- Way too early to proclaim that. You might as well proclaim Lemmy the same - after all, the controversy over Reddit will fade in time and so too will interest in moving away from it.

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

Was it even ever cool?
- Or new.. Same shit in a different package.

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.

From what I've heard about the feel it's a giant data (=cash) grab. Sorta like how Google+ was a me-too and never took off.

The massive inrush is like what happens when the new restaurant opens in town. Everyone goes once or twice to check it out but if it sucks it will still fail even if it is super busy the first week.

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

A mobile only platform is pretty much destined to be the lowest quality social media site around.

Just having a keyboard and mouse makes thoughtful expression so much easier.

Sent from my iPhone
- YouTube comments would like a chance at bat.
- I think it is a three-dimensional bell curve. At one end are the Thumb Warriors on their Phone pumping out vitriol and stupid ideas. At another end are Keyboard Warriors in their basement pumping out vitriol and stupid ideas. And at the third point are the Corporate “Social Media Consultants” pumping out Advertising and Manipulative media.
It would be for me, too, if Zuckerberg weren't a no-go all by himself.

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

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

I don't know about threads but bluesky will go that way
- Yeah, I only heard about BS_😁 a few days ago while learning about the Fediverse. Also Jack Dorsey gives bad vibes.

Womp Womp

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

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

Shocking news

Maybe those 10 Million new subscribers were just bots.

There were definitely "phantom accounts" created out of people's instas who didn't actually sign up.

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.

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.

Is there a rimjob_steve equivalent on Lemmy?
- The fact that you find me worthy of that is truly an honor.
I think this is where the big numbers came from, yeah. That, and cleverly pushing up the launch date to practically the same day Elon limited access to Twitter, so everyone was looking for doomscroll methadone.
Not even just checking out, everyone with an Instagram account had a Threads account created or linked for them with no user input. This was done on purpose in order to boost their user count on launch. Probably 80% of people with a Threads account have never once opened the platform.

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

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

Seeing how useless Rotton Tomatoes is as a barometer of quality, I’m not sure that the best metaphor.

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

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

Someone accidentally shutdown the bot farm

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

I’m sure there’s at least a few ChatGPT bots too!

Everyone's lurking now.

Looks like they’re tracking time on site

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

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.

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.

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.

It'll probably even out. More people will use multiple platforms, follow people where they are active etc.
I’m doubtful. Advertisers will prefer Threads. A massive install base in an app run by a company that has a proven track record of moderation that protects brands. Meta isn’t perfect but brands trust them.
- Initially, I expect you're right, but advertisers also monitor whether users see ads, click on them, and make purchases once they click. Advertisers might not drop it as fast as users, but they will eventually go where the users go.
- That is true they are courting advertisements way more on Threads.

Another one bites the dust

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.

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

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.

Back to Twitter.....