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by poomer 1079 days ago
I'm very skeptical that this will succeed. As with other extremely hyped social medias (anyone remember Clubhouse?) it's already filled with influencers and e-celebs trying to get in early, but these people always poison the well with insincere, low-quality, monetization-oriented content. AFAIK, every successful social media platform grew more or less organically and only had these folks latch on later (usually causing the degradation of the platform when they did).
6 comments

Clubhouse is a bad example as it was the result of entirely unintentional luck due to the pandemic creating a perfect audience. No one outside of a16z thought it had staying power.

In Threads's case, there's some luck with Elon burning Twitter down, but atleast this launch is intentional.

I agree, but I also think that, at this moment, the conditions are right. People are hungry for a twitter alternative and this could lead to a lot of sincere and authentic users joining Threads.
I’m amazed they didn’t provide a feed of only people you follow. Not doing so made the garbage influencer stuff inevitable.
Showing you more content you're not interested in is how they get you to scroll past more ads, it's how they make money.

Traditionally they don't need to care about showing you good content to keep you interested, you're generally logging in anyway.

The proof is in the pudding: if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream.

> if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream.

Why would we ignore the very mainstream Instagram as an example?

> you're generally logging in anyway.

When an app is established, sure. But providing new users a shitty experience in order to prioritise revenue is how new social networks fail.

yes, that’s usually the first thing people say. It’s easy to be skeptical. The odds are often in the skeptics favor.

Personally, I don’t see any value in debating it.

Here’s a classic article explaining why Apple opening retail stores will never work.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-05-20/commentar...

My advice: Skip the worthless debate.

OTOH Twitter is actively imploding and a toxic place for corporate comms and brands, marketing, etc. A meta/FB/Instagram alternative is exactly what those entities want to move towards and rapidly exit the sinking Twitter/Elon ship. I think it's going to do well.
Bluesky is the only one that feels like early Twitter