How thoroughly unsurprising: “Threads’ daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day. That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app’s release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said.”
Here is a brutal truth: phones are too small to be useful for anything except taking and zero-edited sharing videos, doomscrolling through other people’s social media feeds, reading Kindle books, and of course making phone calls. If you want to generate complicated content, you need a real computer. With a keyboard. That includes text more ornate than “lol oopsie [0]-^-[0].” If your Twitter-killer app can’t let you just go on your computer and make stuff there, people won’t adopt it.
Sorry, but that’s objective reality for you.
Moe Lane
PS: Yeah, there’s a part of me that thinks Elon Musk is deliberately crashing Twitter into a wall. Here’s a little secret: that same part of me kind of wants him to, because while it’ll annoy many of my friends, it’ll infuriate and dishearten even more of my enemies.
Deliberately crashing things into walls has a long and storied history. [Vicini]
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In truth, crashing things into walls either breaks the wall or tells you more about the thing you just broke. Either way it can lead to something better than was before. I’m not saying the Musk is trying to do either of those things or that anything he creates afterward will be better, but you can create better things by breaking what you have the right way.
I think it’s possible that Musk is playing both angles in a complicated social media market.
Scenario A: X could crash and burn and then he’d offload its smoking remnants to someone else, possibly at a good time to boost his cash reserves for other projects.
Scenario B: X could actually succeed though possibly in some metamorphosed form. I don’t think it’s going to have the same market and/or features when it’s done. Expecting a social media platform to remain stagnant is all kinds of crazy.
In 2021, Twitter was losing money. Losing money on the order of $220 million on $5 billion in revenue.
At the same time, there is lots of talk and supporting ripples through internet industries, that the whole ad-revenue basis for supporting free internet services is collapsing. (Side Note: IMNSHO, the whole push for AI to replace search systems is in part a result of this, and the way the current revenue generation schemes with ads has poisoned search engine systems generally).
I am not able to judge if Musk is driving it into a brick wall, or trying to make to innovate fast enough to escape a coming collapse, and make a profitable enterprise. Unlike most other Musk activities, I don’t see how this relates to his expressed goals (e.g. getting to Mars).
I have not used Twitter (or now, X), nor do I expect to. I will not use Threads, or any Facebook related product. Sitting on the sidelines, I am entertained by those whole thing.
I don’t really know what he’s doing, but he’s clearly doing *something*.
I recognize that he’s made an insane amounts of money from exploiting bottlenecks, excellent marketing, and taking advantage of short-sighted politicians/bureaucrats.
I recognize that the above is a pretty good description of what’s happened to the internet over the past decade+. But especially since an aggressive social media presence and Wikileaks turned an election in 2016, and the lockdowns of 2020.
I recognize that with Starlink, he’s built a parallel internet infrastructure that can force the old internet paradigm that treats censorship as damage, and route around it.
He’s been part of the “everybody” from “everybody knew” for decades.
He has $&@: you money.
He has publicly recognized that our country and civilization are at a turning point, and has positioned himself at a crux.
I don’t know if he’s going to use hoods leverage to exploit or liberate.
I don’t know how he’s going to do either.
But I’m certain-sure he’s going to do SOMETHING.
And it’s going to be major.