Tag: Threads

Oh, look who’s still a thing

Meta to soon launch web version of Threads in race with X for users

WHY DIDN’T YOU FUCKING HAVE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE, MARK? Honestly, the rollout of Threads was a fucking joke, clearly released before it was fully ready, and I’m not sure it’s improving:

Threads, which launched as an Android and iOS app on July 5 and gained 100 million users in just five days, saw its popularity drop as users returned to the more familiar platform X after the initial rush to try Meta’s new offering.
But in just over a month, its daily active users on Android app dropped to 10.3 million from the peak of 49.3 million, according to a report by analytics platform Similarweb dated Aug. 10.
Meanwhile, the management is moving quickly to launch new features. Threads now offers the ability to set post notifications for accounts and view them in a type of chronological feed.
It will soon roll out an improved search that could allow users to search for specific posts and not just accounts.

…What the fuck is a “type” of chronological feed? Is it chronological or not? And this improved search “could” let users do that… so it also could not do that? I’m not surprised by the drop-off in user numbers cos that was bound to happen, a lot of people were signing up out of curiosity and a lot of those were bound to not bother sticking around once that curiosity was satisfied, given how little Threads seems to have had to offer… on the plus side, I suppose I’ll soon be able to satisfy my own curiosity about Threads cos at least now I’ll actually be able to use the fucking thing, but I feel like it’s probably too late to make a difference now…

Come to our dark side!

In other use, a bunch more Twitter employees could soon be ex-employees…

Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.
Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.

Yeah, “random samples” like this always get blown up to produce a spurious number, and I suspect this “hundreds” is really as bullshit as all these other reports you see in media about how 64% of Inner West residents believe in land rights for gay whales, that sort of thing. Still, I suspect that those 31 Twitter staff are indeed not the only ones, and Oolong will use this information to find out who they all are and sack the lot of them, cos if there’s one thing Twitter really needs it’s even less people working there…

It descends into insanity

Via Taylor Lorenz on Masto. Threads is the literal work of Satan, apparently. The Satanic Panic never fully goes away in the US, does it? Although in this case it’s just been reduced to a particularly shitty tool in a shitty corporate battle between two shitty billionaires, one of whom has evidently inspired some of his his shitty cultists to… whatever the fuck this nonsense is. There is, of course, no dog-whistling involved in using this Satan bullshit to attack Oolong’s business rival when the latter just so happens to be, you know, one of THOSE people. Maybe not a practising or believing one, but one of THEM anyway. Nothing remotely antisemitic going on here at all.

Tangled webs, etc

So in the midst of the Twitter meltdown, eventual presumed rise of Bluesky, and whatever’s happening on Mastodon, Mark Zuckerberg has finally rolled out his long-threatened rival to all of the above, called Threads…

…which I gather is not actually named after the infamous nuclear war-themed BBC TV movie from 1984, but that hasn’t stopped an awful lot of people making that connection.

Continue reading “Tangled webs, etc”