>My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time.
The writer's is clearly mad at life here. Threads is fine. The content is fine. The design is fine. The algorithm is also fine. Not everyone is into whatever nonsense is happening in the twitterworld.
One of my big rules is to mostly listen to product feedback from actual users. Are you using it on a daily basis? What makes it especially good for you?
Because "fine" generally doesn't cut it. There are things I use because I love them, or at least I'm addicted to them. For me, Twitter was like that. There are things I use because I have to. Like LinkedIn. But a nonessential product being seen as "fine" by people who don't use it? That sounds like the kiss of death to me.
The likes of GMail (or indeed Facebook) are, y'know, fine, and seem pretty successful that way. Frankly a good social network should annoy some portion of the Twitter crowd; there's something uniquely nasty about Twitter and replicating it wholesale is a mistake.
IMO, Gmail is allowed to be "fine" because it did a lot of things all in one go:
- provide a decent browser-based client
- lots of free storage!
- spam detection that beat out a lot of other providers at the time
It didn't hurt that it was being run by the what was the Big Tech's darling child at the time. Now, it's kind of hard to exist with out a Google account, and thus a GMail account. Google doesn't make a lot of money directly through GMail, but they make a decent amount of money through the enterprise license for Google Workspaces.
As for Facebook, the product is "fine" in the sense there are lots of users, but "Meta" the company is having doubts about whether the Social Graph is truly the priceless asset we all thought it was. More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192364
It might not be fair, but the expectation that users, Wall Street, and even Meta themselves place on Facebook is that it needs to do a lot better than "fine".
When GMail came out, it was well more than fine; it was a major advance. It had very strong word of mouth. These days it's fine, but that's because email is much less important. It still has a lot of usage for the reason I mentioned: because people still have to use email.
Facebook is similar. People were wildly enthusiastic about it. Some still love it, but for most it's in the "necessary" category. People keep using it not because of Facebook, but because their people are there. Very like LinkedIn in that sense.
If Threads is already only "fine" but isn't necessary, that sounds like the quick path to irrelevancy.
Many, many Twitter users loved it. I loved it. You can feel weird about that if you want, but that's a choice you're making, and trying to push that on me is the only creepy thing I see here.
The writer also did not give any hints to the Threads algorithm about what he likes or prefers (he did not follow, he barely clicked on things, etc.). It's like going to Netflix and just browsing without watching any movies, and then complaining that Netflix "has no purpose" and "is for no one."
Currently, the search function only searches for users and not posts. There are no hashtags, so if I was interested in (for example) Anime art, then I would have no way of finding posts about anime art. I can only find other users who may or may not post anime art, and that search is based a fuzzy search of their name and not their bio
ah yah I heard about that feature anemic MVP rollout. Presumably they'll expand the search mechanism. Seems like a gaping omission for a debut MVP though, wonder what the rush was exactly.
You are missing the point. There is no value to paying 8 bucks a month as the perks are a joke and real verification is not a thing anymore, so why even bother? Also, these power users are amongst the ones that create content and/or drive traffic that Twitter needs (for advertisers). There is zero incentive for them to pay for it. And this is without factoring in the ideological/political battle happening on the platform. The platform is just Musk's toy now and the only thing he is doing a good job at is at alienating and pushing away long term users with his shenanigans.
They have to pay because they have to meet their audience where they are. It's how many nouveau celebrities make money. Some use every platform, pumping out vapid content to fans. They aren't going anywhere.
They don't care about meeting an audience, that's not the reason they use twitter; they create content for fun and for people who are interested to seek it out.
If you offered them a flat "we'll force 10,000 people to see your tweets specifically for just $5" they still wouldn't take it because that's not what they care about or what they are trying to do.
They are users of twitter just as much as they are creators and having their timeline flooded with the kind of content the new bluecheck users create has clearly given them a far worse experience, because the kind of people that would generally pay for the benefits your ascribe are generally the kind of people that these users don't care to interact with at all.
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding. When people talk about twitter power users, they’re largely not talking about influencers, they’re talking about accounts like dril, or about people who are well known for non-twitter reasons.
That might be true if the blue check were a sign of quality. As it is, at best, it's an unreliable sign of quality. And many power users have obviously concluded that it's a sign of poor-quality — why would you pay to associate yourself with poor quality?
