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.
In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies.
I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
Europe's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.
Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.
Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.
I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.
WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else
The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche
My pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.
Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.
It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.
Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.
I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).
The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.
Its definitely not the norm though. I live in central europe and never had whatsapp. Sure some companies offer whatsapp support but they also take email.
I work on a product with >200 million monthly active users and see this all the time. If you only read our product's subreddit you'd think we're a failing business with customers dropping like flies. Meanwhile in the real world we have an incredibly enthusiastic userbase that's growing at a clip.
Very few. It's not a social media app, news site, forum or anything that would benefit from scraping or posting. There's no public "feed" or anything like that. It's a tool.
You're right. I don't think many HNers realize what a bubble HN is, within a bigger bubble of the SF tech scene.
Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out.
Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?
Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.
Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.
> Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?
There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!
> Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.
And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!
> People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake
I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.
I found with FB if you’re in some community that uses it then that’s it, you either use it or miss out.
For a long time my running group used it, and while it still does, the WhatsApp community is more used now. My (Catholic) church still uses Facebook for many announcements along with its own website.
You're probably being downvoted as most here are conflating WhatsApp and FB as both are owned by Meta so you're distinction is moot in the context of this discussion.
that's what happens with stuff that is so popular it becomes infrastructure. It's like the guy who goes "ew I haven't touched Java in ten years" while half the stuff he uses runs on it. WhatsApp in some countries is less of a ChatApp you use than a thing you live in.
Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it
Nah, I'm getting the impression from having a Facebook login and it looking like the platform best representing Dead Internet Theory. That's compared with other Meta platforms I've invested a lot less time in trying to cultivate a social network on which friends actually still communicate on, so it's not like I'm part of some self-selecting group of hardline opponents.
I can remember when my Facebook feed was full of travel and baby pictures (not to mention much earlier days when it was how you got invited to parties) Now when I log in, the feed is full of slop, with maybe one actual update from someone I last saw in high school 20 years ago. That's not just because they're filling the feed with slop for the sake of it. If I navigate to a friend's profile their most recent updates are probably their last three birthdays, each with generic greetings offered by 3-5 people presumably not close enough to have their phone number. My last few friend requests are all bots. I'm sure people still habitually click the app and scroll for a few moments, and also sure it might be different for communities in India or Brazil but yeah... it really isn't what it used to be for regular people who heavily used it for at least a decade and couldn't care less about privacy concerns or Zuck's politics. It's gone from social network to third rate clickbait feed which happens to be a default app on more phones than the better ones...
As for Threads, there was something about the way they tried to entice signups with the world's dullest clickbait that just didn't induce me to see if anyone actually used it for stuff.
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.
Apparently: the algorithmic timeline as it's implemented now has a daily pageview budget for each users. Once it's up, it's up, and the system hides the user from timelines. It doesn't matter if the user is followed by someone, or the user's tweets were retweeted. This applies to both Following and Recommended timelines, but so far not to Lists. This is breaking bunch of fundamental things about the system.
There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.
I'm not on Twitter, but I know a lot of the content I see comes indirectly from Twitter. For example, for soccer news, I follow a number of fans and journalists on BlueSky, but they follow journalists, agents, and official team and league accounts on Twitter, as well as players and players' wives and girlfriends on Instagram. As much as I'd love for them to die and won't touch them myself, it's clear that a lot of the information I get originates on X and Meta platforms.
> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.
I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
> 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.
Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.
I also feel like nobody uses Twitter anymore, after Musk bought it. Now it's just random scammers and "tech bros".
It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.
It's a “community” thing. Some communities have vanished from Twitter almost entirely (like historians), some have massively increased their presence on bluesky but kept their Twitter presence (ex: the military OSINT crowd) and others didn't move at all (Machine learning people are all on Twitter and nowhere else).
Yep I find it hard to believe that real users can tolerate X. It’s FILLED with racists and supremacist content and it is very hard to hide from it. Look at what happened to Vivek Ramaswamy - he had to shut down his account because replies were nearly 100% slurs. If you aren’t aligned with the far right, it’s unusable. The ones saying otherwise are the ones who aren’t targeted by all this because of their demographics, and often, they’re wealthy too. Think VCs and billionaires.
I've used Twitter since the first year it came out (almost 20yrs now) and it's always been filled with crazy politics. It's also always been a platform where you have to invest time to very carefully curate your feed otherwise you get garbage. You can 100% filter out politics and get high quality stuff that suits your interests. It's not like Tiktok where they'll do that job for you with an algorithm and push you into a comfortable bubble immediately. Twitters recommendation algorithms have never been good.
That's absolutely not the case with my "For you" feed.
It's mostly photography and tech.
Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.
For me, the "For you" feed is basically the best-case scenario.
I don't follow anyone and rarely use Twitter, so it doesn't have much signal on me, but a short scroll of my "For you" feed is pretty innocuous.
If I venture into any comment section, it's absolute drek. Going to the feed for a few of my local news channels and clicking through a few of their posts from today, I'm treated to half the comments being stuff along the lines of the following:
"Gee…an immigrant…no surprise"
"Another 3rd world import"
"Can’t predict the weather two days in advance but sure, global boiling for the summer. Got it."
"Queue in the carbon tax. FmL wake up people, it is a scare tactics. Like acid rain, hole in the ozone, polar ice caps flooding the coasts, you NEED CO2 for vegetation to live, and for the vegetation to gove YOU oxygen. Enjoy the few weeks of heat we get."
I click /r/pics, and I see a photo of Black Panther protesters holding assault rifles, a pic of Musk and Trump at dinner with the title yapping about the Epstein files, multiple pics protesting ICE and literally labelling them both fascists and Nazis, a photo of Trump's Hollywood star being smeared with "pedophile", some high ranking border patrol officer labelled a "Nazi officer" for wearing a uniform coat, and so on.
I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.
This seems like a “left has a reality bias” thing? These are current, factual events. Maybe they’re not being shared in right wing spaces, but these things are really happening.
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.
The subcommunity that would have tweets on HN has stayed on Twitter. There are entire separate subcommunities on Twitter that have just died in the past year.
It's like saying you don't see any Instagram posts on HN, so Instagram must be tiny. Its more likely the subcommunities that post on Threads don't have overlap with HN.
Not meaningful in what sense? Sure you’re right, if you mean in the sense of relevancy for the general public. But this definitely is meaningful as it relates to X and Threads relevancy to HN
This is going to sounds stupid, but threads isn't twitter, so its not going to have quite the same content.
One of the more pleasing things about threads is that the "for you" page doesn't appear to push stuff that is rage bait _for you_, (what ever your bias is)
There seems to be a weighting in favour of stuff that isn't angry. There is stuff, but it seems to ask for actual confirmation that you want to continue to see it.
Its not all roses though, they are busy fucking up notifications like they did on facebook.
Instagram has more users than Twitter, but generates no or few HN posts. Something can be used without generating any notable news or information.
I've tried threads. Moderately engaging. Took nothing from it. Twitter has a HN like quality where there's a lot that's unimportant and occasionally you see something you'd see nowhere else.
How many people posting Clash of Kings related content on HN, and what does that say about their user base?
This is a weird metric to determine informational accuracy, as you're talking about a specific use case (reposting content on a 3rd-party platform), you're not accounting for user selection (is the average HN dude more likely to use X or Threads as their primary mico-blogging?) and it doesn't account for the fact that the entire FB/Threads/Instagram ecosystem feeds into itself (I'm never stumbling across X content that I want to engage with because that's now how I use the internet, but I'm constantly clicking something on IG that prompts me to give in and sign up for Threads)
Anything X says at any point about itself is likely to make me very skeptical because I think it's a dogshit site run by a bald, nepotic loser capitalist, that says nothing about the quality of the reporting or how accurate it is though.
> 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).
It's not manipulating numbers, it's abusing their market position to push another product. Or at least that's what we called it when Microsoft did these things in the 90s. Now it's just how business is done
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.
The AI/tech ecosystem on twitter/x really generates a lot of interesting posts still. The discover algorithm is really good at surfacing adjacent content (sim clusters?).
Bluesky occasionally gets a boost of posts but then dies off. This last week's transition has been more vibrant. Simonw, danabramov, natolambert post regularly. (If you're into to the tech things I think it's finally growing. Bluesky is still pretty nasty but blocklists + sentiment changes making it less toxic.)
I think I'd like private likes and other features atproto doesn't currently allow that I think would improve algorithm signal. Currently too easy to pollute bluesky's discover with likes from too many topics.
It doesn't have all the bad x features introduced since 2022 which is nice. Bluesky recreates the active conversation feel twitter has. Does threads, or does it feel like 'comments'?
Funny, I did almost the opposite. I had an active Twitter account for years, but I decided to stop using it when Twitter banned the sitting president of the United States (shortly before he left office). I went back to it after Elon bought it.
> it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other peoples
I don't understand this complaint. The "Following" tab is prominent at the top and gives you exactly what you are asking for. It even remembers which tab was selected.
Not quite in the same way. The folk who did that kind of thing were anti-Musk so most of them left. I suppose there is a right wing group like that too but most of them were driven away earlier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This will only happen when people get extremely tired of these platforms, and some revolution in discoverability happens so people can found the content they are attracted to with as little friction as these platforms provide.
There's no going back to what it was in the late 90s/early 2000s, the audience is different, the way the content is consumed is different, the content itself is very different. Blog networks where you follow through links are not going to be the future.
> Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage.
This is long ago in Internet terms, it's been 15+ years it's not the case, it's unfortunately long in the past.
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.
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
I don’t know in the rest of the world, but in France it does not. It is possible to signup using a phone number. I did not signup because email is not supported.
> 2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following: [...]
> (c) cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
> (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,
so Meta may have decided it's not worth fighting it and removed the requirement for Instagram accounts for people connecting from the EU.
Around a third of the people I used to follow on Instagram had it installed. None of them actively posted there, and I suspect if any of them engaged with it, they were engaging with it after seeing content from Threads that had been cross-promoted to Instagram.
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?
People were listening to the radio a hundred years ago and it was filled with entertainment and politics, often mixed together. I doubt human tastes will change any time soon.
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.
I care - I care that users are leaving a neo-nazi led platform. Problem might be that the new platform's leader also seems to support the current king, sorry, president.
Threads is not a walled garden though. It's got Activity Pub integration and you can follow Fediverse accounts already. I think the other way around it's still a work in progress.
It’s actually not, it’s not apparent what you mean at all. As a result this reads as a comment that doesn’t engage anyone except those who share your particular thoughts.
Could you perhaps spell out what irony you are referring to?
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.
Luckily, we have alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon. Even Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit nowadays (I'd say, even better than Reddit). It has a bit of a Hacker News vibe, but on different subjects.
I view my presence as mostly transactional here. I read posted content, I read comments, I sometimes comment and have exchanges like this. But aside from a little dopamine hit from getting a few upvotes, my emotional investment here is limited.
I don’t have professional or personal connections here (though I know a few members irl) and this is not part of my permanent digital identity— I don’t have one of those, for a few reasons. Others do it differently, and I think the risk of HN going bad is low, so I understand the risk they are taking.
This is a mall - a publically open space privately owned by others - not a true public square. It’s better than x, fb, etc. in part because the private ownership is mostly used for good (strong moderation) rather than for obvious bad.
I've weaned off Meta and X entirely, but not a single person I know IRL, including family, has. Standing on principle shows you how many people you know wouldn't even consider it.
Depends how you define "strong activity". Its only 50k MAU so i'd say its punching far above its weight in terms on good content/users. The tech(selfhosting, linux, privacy) communities are pretty good, you make a post you will get answers and discussion.
You shouldn't look for interesting Lemmy instances; you can pretty much use any instance and subscribe to interesting _communities_ from there.
If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local".
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.
Media outlets frequently cite Twitter posts which perhaps adds to the perception that its use is more widespread than other social media.
In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies.
I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.
Europe's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.
Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.
Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.
I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.
WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else
The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche
My pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.
Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.
It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.
Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.
I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).
The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.
That might be more likely now given recent events
Its definitely not the norm though. I live in central europe and never had whatsapp. Sure some companies offer whatsapp support but they also take email.
This seems like the sort of anecdotal experience the post to which you’re responding is talking about haha
Yep, it is a thing in a handful of Western European countries.
None of my Asian friends live in China or India, so clearly there’s no one living there.
I work on a product with >200 million monthly active users and see this all the time. If you only read our product's subreddit you'd think we're a failing business with customers dropping like flies. Meanwhile in the real world we have an incredibly enthusiastic userbase that's growing at a clip.
How many of your monthly active users are bots?
Very few. It's not a social media app, news site, forum or anything that would benefit from scraping or posting. There's no public "feed" or anything like that. It's a tool.
You're right. I don't think many HNers realize what a bubble HN is, within a bigger bubble of the SF tech scene.
Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out.
Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?
Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.
Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.
> Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?
There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!
> Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.
And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!
> People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake
I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.
I found with FB if you’re in some community that uses it then that’s it, you either use it or miss out.
For a long time my running group used it, and while it still does, the WhatsApp community is more used now. My (Catholic) church still uses Facebook for many announcements along with its own website.
You're probably being downvoted as most here are conflating WhatsApp and FB as both are owned by Meta so you're distinction is moot in the context of this discussion.
I hear this stuff from people who do use Facebook. They just don't consider their use "use." It's weirdly dissonant.
that's what happens with stuff that is so popular it becomes infrastructure. It's like the guy who goes "ew I haven't touched Java in ten years" while half the stuff he uses runs on it. WhatsApp in some countries is less of a ChatApp you use than a thing you live in.
Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it
Nah, I'm getting the impression from having a Facebook login and it looking like the platform best representing Dead Internet Theory. That's compared with other Meta platforms I've invested a lot less time in trying to cultivate a social network on which friends actually still communicate on, so it's not like I'm part of some self-selecting group of hardline opponents.
I can remember when my Facebook feed was full of travel and baby pictures (not to mention much earlier days when it was how you got invited to parties) Now when I log in, the feed is full of slop, with maybe one actual update from someone I last saw in high school 20 years ago. That's not just because they're filling the feed with slop for the sake of it. If I navigate to a friend's profile their most recent updates are probably their last three birthdays, each with generic greetings offered by 3-5 people presumably not close enough to have their phone number. My last few friend requests are all bots. I'm sure people still habitually click the app and scroll for a few moments, and also sure it might be different for communities in India or Brazil but yeah... it really isn't what it used to be for regular people who heavily used it for at least a decade and couldn't care less about privacy concerns or Zuck's politics. It's gone from social network to third rate clickbait feed which happens to be a default app on more phones than the better ones...
As for Threads, there was something about the way they tried to entice signups with the world's dullest clickbait that just didn't induce me to see if anyone actually used it for stuff.
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.
Vast majority on X are silent observers just scrolling, liking and bookmarking.
This is likely true, but that is also true for other platforms. Like Threads that OP shared.
Apparently: the algorithmic timeline as it's implemented now has a daily pageview budget for each users. Once it's up, it's up, and the system hides the user from timelines. It doesn't matter if the user is followed by someone, or the user's tweets were retweeted. This applies to both Following and Recommended timelines, but so far not to Lists. This is breaking bunch of fundamental things about the system.
There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.
I'm not on Twitter, but I know a lot of the content I see comes indirectly from Twitter. For example, for soccer news, I follow a number of fans and journalists on BlueSky, but they follow journalists, agents, and official team and league accounts on Twitter, as well as players and players' wives and girlfriends on Instagram. As much as I'd love for them to die and won't touch them myself, it's clear that a lot of the information I get originates on X and Meta platforms.
> X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all.
Honest question: how does 561 million active users should feel?
> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.
I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
> 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.
Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.
>I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want
Good luck with that. You didn't really buy it, you're temporarily renting it from Musk. If you stop paying, you'll also lose your username.
Payment is one time, it doesn’t renew. They won’t sell it unless it’s inactive. It won’t be inactive.
For now. Although I doubt this would happen, they legally could write to you tomorrow demanding $100/mo because they want to.
Well any company could legally do that at any point so I'm not sure how this is any different.
I also feel like nobody uses Twitter anymore, after Musk bought it. Now it's just random scammers and "tech bros".
It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.
It's a “community” thing. Some communities have vanished from Twitter almost entirely (like historians), some have massively increased their presence on bluesky but kept their Twitter presence (ex: the military OSINT crowd) and others didn't move at all (Machine learning people are all on Twitter and nowhere else).
Machine learning is slowly happening on bluesky. It would just take one lab defecting. And maybe hosting some better feed algorithm technology.
Lots of the best ai content is only on Bluesky now.
Yep I find it hard to believe that real users can tolerate X. It’s FILLED with racists and supremacist content and it is very hard to hide from it. Look at what happened to Vivek Ramaswamy - he had to shut down his account because replies were nearly 100% slurs. If you aren’t aligned with the far right, it’s unusable. The ones saying otherwise are the ones who aren’t targeted by all this because of their demographics, and often, they’re wealthy too. Think VCs and billionaires.
I've used Twitter since the first year it came out (almost 20yrs now) and it's always been filled with crazy politics. It's also always been a platform where you have to invest time to very carefully curate your feed otherwise you get garbage. You can 100% filter out politics and get high quality stuff that suits your interests. It's not like Tiktok where they'll do that job for you with an algorithm and push you into a comfortable bubble immediately. Twitters recommendation algorithms have never been good.
That's absolutely not the case with my "For you" feed.
It's mostly photography and tech.
Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.
For me, the "For you" feed is basically the best-case scenario.
I don't follow anyone and rarely use Twitter, so it doesn't have much signal on me, but a short scroll of my "For you" feed is pretty innocuous.
If I venture into any comment section, it's absolute drek. Going to the feed for a few of my local news channels and clicking through a few of their posts from today, I'm treated to half the comments being stuff along the lines of the following:
"Gee…an immigrant…no surprise"
"Another 3rd world import"
"Can’t predict the weather two days in advance but sure, global boiling for the summer. Got it."
"Queue in the carbon tax. FmL wake up people, it is a scare tactics. Like acid rain, hole in the ozone, polar ice caps flooding the coasts, you NEED CO2 for vegetation to live, and for the vegetation to gove YOU oxygen. Enjoy the few weeks of heat we get."
"She is a communist cow who supports terrorists"
Can you provide some examples of what you think left extremism is?
I click /r/pics, and I see a photo of Black Panther protesters holding assault rifles, a pic of Musk and Trump at dinner with the title yapping about the Epstein files, multiple pics protesting ICE and literally labelling them both fascists and Nazis, a photo of Trump's Hollywood star being smeared with "pedophile", some high ranking border patrol officer labelled a "Nazi officer" for wearing a uniform coat, and so on.
I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.
You’re telling on yourself here my brother
This seems like a “left has a reality bias” thing? These are current, factual events. Maybe they’re not being shared in right wing spaces, but these things are really happening.
These are left extremist takes on current events.
On social media, when I click "Pics", I'd expect photography.
What we see there is political content that distinctly reminds of a publication from a local socialist youth chapter.
facts and pictures/videos of ICE brutalizing people in Minnesota.
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.
The subcommunity that would have tweets on HN has stayed on Twitter. There are entire separate subcommunities on Twitter that have just died in the past year.
It's like saying you don't see any Instagram posts on HN, so Instagram must be tiny. Its more likely the subcommunities that post on Threads don't have overlap with HN.
That's not meaningful, it all depends on what content is shared on the respective platforms.
Not meaningful in what sense? Sure you’re right, if you mean in the sense of relevancy for the general public. But this definitely is meaningful as it relates to X and Threads relevancy to HN
I bet even fediverse posts rank higher than threads. Blue Sky definitely
This assumes this website is a representative sample of the population.
This is going to sounds stupid, but threads isn't twitter, so its not going to have quite the same content.
One of the more pleasing things about threads is that the "for you" page doesn't appear to push stuff that is rage bait _for you_, (what ever your bias is)
There seems to be a weighting in favour of stuff that isn't angry. There is stuff, but it seems to ask for actual confirmation that you want to continue to see it.
Its not all roses though, they are busy fucking up notifications like they did on facebook.
Instagram has more users than Twitter, but generates no or few HN posts. Something can be used without generating any notable news or information.
I've tried threads. Moderately engaging. Took nothing from it. Twitter has a HN like quality where there's a lot that's unimportant and occasionally you see something you'd see nowhere else.
Instagram is a fundamentally different type of media, whereas Threads is basically a Twitter clone.
We are the tech bros
How many people posting Clash of Kings related content on HN, and what does that say about their user base?
This is a weird metric to determine informational accuracy, as you're talking about a specific use case (reposting content on a 3rd-party platform), you're not accounting for user selection (is the average HN dude more likely to use X or Threads as their primary mico-blogging?) and it doesn't account for the fact that the entire FB/Threads/Instagram ecosystem feeds into itself (I'm never stumbling across X content that I want to engage with because that's now how I use the internet, but I'm constantly clicking something on IG that prompts me to give in and sign up for Threads)
Anything X says at any point about itself is likely to make me very skeptical because I think it's a dogshit site run by a bald, nepotic loser capitalist, that says nothing about the quality of the reporting or how accurate it is though.
> 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).
Are you claiming Zuckerberg is manipulating numbers? I'm speechless!
It's not manipulating numbers, it's abusing their market position to push another product. Or at least that's what we called it when Microsoft did these things in the 90s. Now it's just how business is done
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.
The AI/tech ecosystem on twitter/x really generates a lot of interesting posts still. The discover algorithm is really good at surfacing adjacent content (sim clusters?).
Bluesky occasionally gets a boost of posts but then dies off. This last week's transition has been more vibrant. Simonw, danabramov, natolambert post regularly. (If you're into to the tech things I think it's finally growing. Bluesky is still pretty nasty but blocklists + sentiment changes making it less toxic.)
I think I'd like private likes and other features atproto doesn't currently allow that I think would improve algorithm signal. Currently too easy to pollute bluesky's discover with likes from too many topics.
It doesn't have all the bad x features introduced since 2022 which is nice. Bluesky recreates the active conversation feel twitter has. Does threads, or does it feel like 'comments'?
Funny, I did almost the opposite. I had an active Twitter account for years, but I decided to stop using it when Twitter banned the sitting president of the United States (shortly before he left office). I went back to it after Elon bought it.
So you're into Nazi salutes and CSAM?
"Shadow of its former self"
Meh, I've seen it before and after. It used to have a lynch mob mentality, but now it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other people's.
> it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other peoples
I don't understand this complaint. The "Following" tab is prominent at the top and gives you exactly what you are asking for. It even remembers which tab was selected.
My complaint is that it doesn't default to "following". It's caught me out a few times. I'm not much interested in curated whatever on social media.
> It used to have a lynch mob mentality
Still does?
Not quite in the same way. The folk who did that kind of thing were anti-Musk so most of them left. I suppose there is a right wing group like that too but most of them were driven away earlier.
There has been a lot of lynch mobs on X surrounding more recent events (e.g. Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, etc).
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.
Every time I open threads it’s mostly ChatGPT garbage from wannabe tech or finance influencers.
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.
IG/Threads/FB are all a shared ecosystem with co-posting and such. X is an island apart. The network effect is absolutely in play.
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.
Apparently about half of Twitter are Japanese users, though many may be Chinese using Japan to access.
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.
This will only happen when people get extremely tired of these platforms, and some revolution in discoverability happens so people can found the content they are attracted to with as little friction as these platforms provide.
There's no going back to what it was in the late 90s/early 2000s, the audience is different, the way the content is consumed is different, the content itself is very different. Blog networks where you follow through links are not going to be the future.
> Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage.
This is long ago in Internet terms, it's been 15+ years it's not the case, it's unfortunately long in the past.
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...
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
I don’t know in the rest of the world, but in France it does not. It is possible to signup using a phone number. I did not signup because email is not supported.
The EU considers Instagram a "Core Platform Service" (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...), which comes with a bunch of restrictions. Article 5 paragraph 2 of the DMA comes awfully close to what amadeuswoo is describing:
> 2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following: [...]
> (c) cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
> (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,
so Meta may have decided it's not worth fighting it and removed the requirement for Instagram accounts for people connecting from the EU.
Around a third of the people I used to follow on Instagram had it installed. None of them actively posted there, and I suspect if any of them engaged with it, they were engaging with it after seeing content from Threads that had been cross-promoted to Instagram.
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?
> it looks like 150m to 125m
The graph shows a decline in Daily Active Users worldwide, not just in the US.
The sooner this "communication as entertainment" era of humanity passes the better
People were listening to the radio a hundred years ago and it was filled with entertainment and politics, often mixed together. I doubt human tastes will change any time soon.
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
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.
Hahaha it's April 1st?
Who cares. From one walled garden to the next. Renting identities on permissioned networks is so tiresome.
I care - I care that users are leaving a neo-nazi led platform. Problem might be that the new platform's leader also seems to support the current king, sorry, president.
Threads is not a walled garden though. It's got Activity Pub integration and you can follow Fediverse accounts already. I think the other way around it's still a work in progress.
One day Facebook used open XMPP so you could chat across networks. It does not anymore. Why would we expect AP integration to survive?
Also due to large amount of spam, many instances don't federate with Threads.
Till you can't.
Once they all had apis.
It will remain a work in progress forever. There's no incentive to implement anything further.
The irony on this post is palpable.
It’s actually not, it’s not apparent what you mean at all. As a result this reads as a comment that doesn’t engage anyone except those who share your particular thoughts.
Could you perhaps spell out what irony you are referring to?
You're literally doing the "and yet you participate in society" bit...
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.
Great! Let's change an evil billionaires platform for another evil billionaire platform.
Bluesky is the only decent place (till it isn't).
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.
Luckily, we have alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon. Even Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit nowadays (I'd say, even better than Reddit). It has a bit of a Hacker News vibe, but on different subjects.
I’m on a lovely local mastodon instance with polite people who post interesting things. It feels like internet from a bygone age.
We also have the alternative of logging out and disengaging with social media.
Why search for the best version of a bad thing?
Especially when entropy inevitably takes your investment in building a digital persona there and devalues it?
So why are you here?
I view my presence as mostly transactional here. I read posted content, I read comments, I sometimes comment and have exchanges like this. But aside from a little dopamine hit from getting a few upvotes, my emotional investment here is limited.
I don’t have professional or personal connections here (though I know a few members irl) and this is not part of my permanent digital identity— I don’t have one of those, for a few reasons. Others do it differently, and I think the risk of HN going bad is low, so I understand the risk they are taking.
This is a mall - a publically open space privately owned by others - not a true public square. It’s better than x, fb, etc. in part because the private ownership is mostly used for good (strong moderation) rather than for obvious bad.
I've weaned off Meta and X entirely, but not a single person I know IRL, including family, has. Standing on principle shows you how many people you know wouldn't even consider it.
Can you please point me to some interesting Lemmy instances? I haven't been able to find anyone with strong activity by myself. Appreciated.
Depends how you define "strong activity". Its only 50k MAU so i'd say its punching far above its weight in terms on good content/users. The tech(selfhosting, linux, privacy) communities are pretty good, you make a post you will get answers and discussion.
You shouldn't look for interesting Lemmy instances; you can pretty much use any instance and subscribe to interesting _communities_ from there.
If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local".
Some random active communities to follow:
- https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted
- https://mander.xyz/c/science_memes
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://lemmy.ca/c/pcgaming
There's no way this is true lol