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Threads App Usage Plummets (theguardian.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the after-the-buzz dept.
Despite a record-breaking start in its first weeks of launch, engagement with Meta's Threads app continues to plummet. According to Similarweb, engagement is down 79% from a high of 2.3 million active users in early July to 576,000 as of August 7th. The Guardian reports: In addition to users jumping ship, large US companies like the fast food chain Wendy's, the clothing store Anthropologie and Rare Beauty, a makeup line, have all decreased the number of posts they publish on Threads, Adweek reports. On its busiest day, the number of users of Threads was less than half that of Twitter, according to Similarweb data. Twitter averages more than 100 million active daily users.
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Threads App Usage Plummets More

Threads App Usage Plummets

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  • So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Monday August 14, 2023 @08:34PM (#63767816)

    Are people just getting tired of social media apps? Or did these people find a more valuable use for their time?

    Telling us all about numbers declining does not reveal the critical point - WHY?

    • Re:So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Monday August 14, 2023 @08:38PM (#63767822) Homepage

      It's facebook, isn't it a sufficient enough answer to your "WHY?" question? It is for me at least... /s

      • It's facebook, isn't it a sufficient enough answer to your "WHY?" question? It is for me at least... /s

        The principle of Occam's Razor might suggest that you are right despite your sarcasm.

        Until somebody actually does the real dull boring research...all we will have is speculation.

        Given all of the useless projects funded by various US government appropriations bills, agencies, and labs you'd think some researcher would have already submitted a research grant proposal for 250,000-500,000 USD just so they can look into this.

    • WHY?

      It's something new, so everyone is checking it out. That results in big numbers at first. But now they are discovering that it is just the same old crap with a different name. It isn't any better, or different or more useful than what they already have, so why bother.

      Anyone with half a brain saw this coming.

    • So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease?

      There are a few reasons.

      1) They were doomed by the ease of initial use for all Instagram users. Pretty much most active Instagram users converted just to check it out. But they were really instagram users, not really Twitter kind of users, and so many have just not come back in much.

      2) The reason it was easy to start using Threads so quickly, is that really it's just a window over your instagram account - it's all the same account. But that has a dark side, if you go

    • Because they're trying to sell Twitter to Facebook users. The two paradigms are fundamentally incompatible. Oh... and Facebook is friends and family, Twitter is strangers sharing interests, LinkedIn is work, Snapchat is mating. People don't want to mix these things.

    • Telling us all about numbers declining does not reveal the critical point - WHY?

      Because everybody looked at it, went "meh!", then went back to what they were using before.

    • Re:So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease? (Score:5, Informative)

      by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @03:56AM (#63768414)

      For me, it's because it's non-functional.

      Whenever I opened the app, I would get 1 post from someone I follow and then a continuous feed of crap that I don't care about from accounts I don't follow.

      The only way to see posts from the accounts I follow was to open my profile, click on privacy, then click on profiles I follow and then click on each account in turn.

      It only took a few tries for me to say fuck it and abandon Threads.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      People moved to Threads because Twitter has been getting steadily worse since Musk bought it. The problem is, Twitter isn't just the platform, it's the networks of people. There is no way to transfer the networks to Threads, and a lot of them were decimated anyway because Threads is US only.

      Musk is destroying the communities that people built on Twitter, and there is no easy way to move them somewhere else. It didn't work with Mastodon either.

    • Re:So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @05:54AM (#63768512) Journal

      Are people just getting tired of social media apps? Or did these people find a more valuable use for their time?

      Telling us all about numbers declining does not reveal the critical point - WHY?

      Why? Because switching to threads just to give the finger to Elon is only exciting for about 5 minutes.

      • It wasn't even that. Most of the threads account signups and activity were just people laying stake to a piece of online realestate. Log in once, register @burgerking, or @cascadingstylesheet and that's done. A large portion of the 100 million thread accounts are brands and businesses. Very few people would have signed up just to give Musk the finger. They signed up in case it does become worth while using at some point.

    • It sure looks like all the people left, and now it is only bots.

    • Re:So What Is The Cause Of This Decrease? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @07:10AM (#63768640) Journal

      The issue is the original numbers were nonsense.

      This is if anything the first batch of numbers worth looking at. When the thing went live - as with all social media properties - there was land grab. A rush to register a cool handle, and establish some kind of presence there, in case it becomes the next new thing.

      Every corporate marketing department would have negligent if they didn't make the defensive play of at least duplicating their other social media blasts there, every individual that considers themselves an influences behaves the same way for the same reasons. A whole lot of other people just go to kick the tires because they read about it on a blog during lunch.

      Now we are starting to see how many users actually like the platform and their engagement there enough to continue it.

      Any platform launch like this by a 'credible' technology company is going to see this kind of pan flash. Even less 'credible' efforts like Parler or Truth, don't see as big a pop but the engagement follows the same trajectory. What will matter for all of these is what happens now, slow organic growth or slowly dwindling into irrelevance.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by frankjr ( 591955 )
        From what I gather, much of the initial usage was from Instagram influencers trying to find new ways to boost their own posts back on Instagram. I guess that didn't work out so they are predictably going to stop using it.

    • Can't post from a regular web browser on PC. Gotta post from the app. That's more friction for content creators than other apps. So all else being equal, threads was always going to die. No top brands or celebrities with assistants running their socials are going to use it if you can't copy paste from email on a pc.

      • Honestly that is my issue. I mostly use social media on my laptop when posting and on my phone while doom scrolling on a shitter. Not being able to post lowers my engagement.

    • AFAIK, most people only signed up to reserve their name on it.

      After that, it became as interesting as watching a read-out of a phone book. Or watching paint dry.

    • I think they launched ahead of schedule due to some perceived 'this is the final straw, this time!' disaster at Twitter. That and it is my understanding that they don't have a web interface, just the app, so it's less open in the way Twitter was or Mastodon/Firefish is. I'm not sure if wrapping Twitter into X does anything to alleviate the leveraged buyout debt, but if so it might simply decay into a present but largely irrelevant Yahoo type company rather than collapsing outright.

    • Nah, I think everyone realized that short-form text "social networking" is pretty stupid and there's really only space for one of them - I imagine it's fairly tedious trying to post the same stupid crap that 99% of people give no fucks about to two different services that both suck.

    • An obvious, catastrophic Zuck-punch error was inevitable. It is only a phone app. Zuck wants everyone on their phone using his app, so that he track and monetize most efficiently. There is no way to use Threads with a browser, and thus on a computer.

      Much like Musk deciding "everyone shall use dark mode", billionaire execs trying to force people to do things is not a way to get "adoption" (that magic word). Zuck decided "everyone shall use my app on their phone to thread, there shall be no other option" and

    • Not my experience at all; lots of information shared there with much less biased trolling. Waiting for a working browser version and a basic search function - itâ(TM)s still a new, incomplete thing.
      Ask yourself who benefits from spreading a rumor that Threads is failing.

  • so I had to revert to the other media platforms to adore the astronomical dimensions of her behind.
    What else would be important to stay on Threads?

  • X app (Score:5, Funny)

    by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Monday August 14, 2023 @08:43PM (#63767830)

    They're all moving over to that new 'X' app I've heard about.

  • cage match (Score:5, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday August 14, 2023 @08:48PM (#63767836)

    I was only there for the cage match. Now that the match is off...

  • At least for me. I think that might encourage others, especially when posting video content. However, no one wants to leave Twitter while everyone is still on it. It's like Twitter is the hot and popular bar that everyone goes to - who wants to hang out at some smaller bar with no crowd?
  • no one want's zucks fake twitter, the only reason they had users in the first place is because meta signed the users up. People came and checked it out and went back to other things.

    • No meta didn't sign users up. Users signed up, mainly to prevent other people signing up under their handle. The overwhelming majority of activity on threads was business / brand related. A lot of the rest were people like me, registering my account and then not logging in again.

  • Even Zuckerberg doesn't use it. And when he does, he posts something lame.

  • "Meta" "Threads" The old snakey name change tactic. Just like manufactures of dangerous and deadly products do when caught by the government regulators. Sell the same old shit under a new brand/company name.

  • ...because it was fueled entirely by "I hate Elon Musk for spoiling our echo chamber!" Toddler-tantrums.

    You see, stamping your feet in rage and threatening to take your ball and go home ONLY WORKS if people like you in the first place. If you're an odious venom-spitting dogma salesman that people only hang out with because your particular flavor of bile happens to validate their own prejudices, then your leaving literally leaves the room smelling better than before.

    By the way, say hi to Mastodon while you'

  • Time? (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @07:24AM (#63768670)
    I wonder if it might take time to build a successful business.

    • It more likely takes being feature complete - which Threads is very much not.

      If you can't show trending feeds, and don't have any kind of multi-axis indexing such as hashtags, you are never going to displace Xitter. And if you don't have a web interface, then nobody that is a professional marketing or media type is going to use your garbage service, because they cannot easily post it to many places at once in order to generate maximum exposure.

      I'm honestly surprised they didn't launch previous to having bo

  • If it had these two features, I'd never look at X again

  • If it had a web-based interface, I'd use it more.. (Score:3)

    by Smid ( 446509 ) on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @08:17AM (#63768814)

    I just don't use phone apps. I'm on the net via a desktop PC. Threads does not exist in that sphere.

    I'm guessing they fired everyone with half a brain otherwise they might have spotted this.

    • I agree a web interface would be required to replace Twitter but I imagine it isn't as good at slurping user data as an app.

  • Threads is by far the most popular social media app for non-conformists. Just Bing it.

  • Instead of trying to compete with Twitter/X, they should have spent the effort on fixing the sh*tshow that Facebook itself has become. They took away the Most Recent feed and instead ends up repeating old content that you've already decided wasn't worth devoting eyeball time to. That means that most people are spending less time on the platform.

  • At this point why not just make those mainstream and everyone go there and make an account so grandma can stay in touch. Plus you can charge her per visitvideo. Raise the price for those relatives you're not too fond of.

    There are non-sexual channels there. Someone told me that anyway.

  • I didn't look at it. Because, who cares? But, obviously lots of people and bots decided to check it out because we must punish Trump. Er, I mean Musk.

    What did they find there? Same garbage they did not look at on twitter. So, why bother looking there. No content. It's like somebody started a competitor to youtube and the only thing available on it was cnn and msnbc.

  • As recently highlighted by John Gruber (no friend of Meta) at Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] , the data that news articles like this are using is complete garbage.

    Companies like Similar Web and Sensor Tower use apps that are essentially, perhaps absolutely, spyware. No person with even a little sophistication about the risks of being online would side load and give permissions to free apps that claim to help treat phone addiction by uploading EVERYTHING you do to some mystery server, nor would they do ad blocking by usi

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