- There's a tremendous anchoring bias around people's perceptions of Meta products. "I don't see anyone using [Product N] in my social circle, so it must be doomed."
It's been like this for at least ten years. People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake. Americans having no idea how important WhatsApp is elsewhere. Etc.
When user bases are measured in billions, you simply can't extrapolate your own anecdotal experience to anything. Some Meta product/feature can be very popular among a hundred disparate groups like "Filipino diaspora" and "Spanish-speaking children" and "North European singles" (and who knows how many more), but your social network has no intersection with these hundreds of millions of people, so you'd never know.
You can see many examples of this effect in these comments.
- I wish someone at X would leak data on the current state of the user base. Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere.
Apparently X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.
Maybe they’re not being shadowbanned or ghosted. There’s just almost no real people using that site.
by terminalshort
9 subcomments
- For HN posts in the last week Twitter leads Threads 106-2. Not necessarily a representative sample her, but lopsided enough to make me very skeptical of the claim that Threads has more active users.
- > Instead, Threads’ boost in daily mobile usage may be driven by other factors, including cross-promotions from Meta’s larger social apps like Facebook and Instagram (where Threads is regularly advertised to existing users)
This. I use Instagram and every time I scroll through the feed there's a stripe of Threads content, clearly algorithmically chosen to grab attention. The thing is, only the top part of every post is visible, and one needs to download / go to Threads to read the rest and the replies (many posts I've seen are specifically the kind where you're more interested in replies than the post itself).
- I've just recently deactivated my account from X/Twitter - I gave it a shot since Elon took it over. It has become a shadow of its former self. I haven't tried Threads yet, I think I'm just gonna pause on these social media for a while.
by reactordev
0 subcomment
- I’ll continue to use neither. All these social media platforms can die. Let’s bring back forums and moderation. I feel like current LLMs can do a good job of flagging content if you give it some rules.
I miss the discussions on things like game dev, digital art, programming, math, etc that I used to get from forums that have since all moved to discord and has become a hollowed existence.
Maybe this is just me getting old. Mastodon sounded like it could have been the next thing but the whole distributed nature makes it cumbersome. I’ll look into it again.
I found that 2025 was the year for me to stop, decompress, research SOTA models and AI stuff, and disconnect from anything not providing in my life.
by Interesco
1 subcomments
- I've noticed (in people I follow) that many Instagram posts also get posted to threads at the same time (automatically?). I didn't see it in the article, but I wonder how many of these users are posting on Instagram primarily with threads as side effect.
- Apparently about half of Twitter are Japanese users, though many may be Chinese using Japan to access.
- Every time I open threads it’s mostly ChatGPT garbage from wannabe tech or finance influencers.
by amadeuswoo
2 subcomments
- It's worth noting Threads requires an Instagram account to sign up. That's like a 2B+ user funnel with constant in-app cross-promotion.
Not diminishing the growth, but "daily active users" hitting parity with X is a different achievement when you have that kind of distribution baked in Meta
- It's time to move (back) to self-hosted solutions. There is nothing worse than corporate platforms that can "moderate" users for one reason or another. Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage.
Another unfortunate trend is that laypeople using real names on "social media." It's fine if you are a politician or artist using this as an "official" comms account, but for ordinary people it's just asking for trouble.
by mullingitover
0 subcomment
- I think it's just TikTok eating them alive[1] globally (let's face it, microblogging is simply inferior to short form video when it comes to creating stimulating content), along with the self-own of making themselves overtly The Right-Wing Site and alienating half of the US audience. Musk himself even said:
> "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally?
So clearly he knew he was making the site undeserving of public trust and reaping the rewards of that.
Also, the site is leaning into creating content that's overtly immoral and downright felonious in many jurisdictions, and this is likely going to catch up with it this year. I would bet this current bad news for them is just the beginning.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294062/social-media-yea...
by extraduder_ire
0 subcomment
- From the article, this is only in mobile users specifically.
They both have ~150M mobile users. But twitter has about that number of "web" users, whereas threads.com/.net only have about 8.5M users.
I can't find a link to the source in TFA, besides the similarweb homepage, nor can I find anything on their website about their methodology. Just two unsourced images on techcrunch of graphs from similarweb. I would really like to know how they are gathering this data.
- Meta uses dark patterns to inflate Threads DAU. If you install Threads, it starts sending notifications for suggested posts every day. It also sends notifications on Instagram, and when you click it, it opens a random post on Threads. I don't follow anyone on Threads.
- Threads seems to be growing, but I'm also interested in a graph of Twitter usership since the acquisition? The one year view here doesn't really show the full trend.
> A year ago, X had twice as many daily active users in the U.S. as it does now
also this just doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the graph. it looks like 150m to 125m?
by ohyoutravel
0 subcomment
- I was one of the first 100,000 to join threads, and that seemed to mean I needed to join within hours of access. Really enjoy it, haven’t logged in to twitter in several years.
- Deleted my previous comment, but as they say on X/Twitter right after a banger drops: “I am never deleting this app.”
by kristopolous
0 subcomment
- Threads seems to be mostly children in the Spanish speaking world. It's not the same product
Social media is once again stubbornly regional both in place and age
- The sooner this "communication as entertainment" era of humanity passes the better
by Mockapapella
0 subcomment
- I have a small-medium following on Threads in the AI/tech space (~7K) and regularly post there, and have started posting on Twitter a little more recently, so I feel like I can provide some extra insight that might be missing in this thread.
The exposure to "what's what" in the tech space is clearly better on Twitter and it isn't even close. Nearly all tech news breaks on Twitter first, then flows downstream to Threads. For everything else it's kind of hard to say because I aggressively curate my social media feeds, so I don't get much content outside of my bubble.
The tech information I tend to get on Threads is more personal updates on mutuals' projects and niche eureka moments they have. There's maybe a dozen of these that I regularly see and interact with and maybe a couple dozen more that pop up occasionally. But again, this is after aggressively curating my feed and maintaining it for ~3 years.
I have a feeling that my efforts could have yielded better results on Twitter had I spent all that time posting and interacting there instead of Threads (or in addition to), hence me increasing my posting there.
- Hahaha it's April 1st?
by nephihaha
1 subcomments
- There are reports of a lot of bots on Threads. I don't know anyone who uses it but maybe I hang out with the wrong people.
by unboxingelf
3 subcomments
- Who cares. From one walled garden to the next. Renting identities on permissioned networks is so tiresome.
- I don't like this future where we're just trading users between a couple billionaires who all support the trump regime. I especially don't like that all social media is being consolidated to one company (Facebook/Meta) just like all of journalism is consolidating into one company. Bring back the anti trust.
- [dead]
- There's no way this is true lol
- Great! Let's change an evil billionaires platform for another evil billionaire platform.
Bluesky is the only decent place (till it isn't).
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