From what I have seen so far Threads seems to have been an incredibly rushed and premature launch, done directly to counter Twitter's missteps from the last few weeks. And the decision is proving to be the absolute correct one.
What I don't understand is why Bluesky didn't seize the opportunity first. People were literally banging on their doors begging to be let in and they continued to go "sorry we are exclusive, invites only". Now no one gives a shit.
A social network being invite-only is such an obvious non-starter that I genuinely can't imagine the conversation that went into that decision. Assuming the basic underlying tech works more often that not (and ideally some story for community moderation), there's literally nothing I want from a Twitter competitor other than having everyone on it. My interest in a Twitter competitor that is invite-only is and will always be exactly zero.
It works extremely well - it guarantees you know* someone on the social network. No empty feeds, no literally-no-one to talk at, you have someone you can ask questions about the site, etc.
Speaking from experience working on a social site with loads of signup flow experiments: the results are consistently wild. It's no competition on all the normally-valued metrics like interactions and retention.
*for some degree of "know" anyway. Better in most cases than "the news talked about this tweeter thing"
(edit: I do think they may have missed what might be the biggest boat sailing party, which was probably a mistake. But invite-only is quite reasonable.)
It guarantees you know one person on the network. And if you like it and want to invite everyone else – tough luck.
Threads solved the cold start problem by not having a personal feed at all at launch. There is only a single algorithmically curated one, prioritizing first/second/third/etc degree connections and otherwise showing content from everyone else. So the place always felt alive from day 1.
Unfortunately, they likely used AI to sock puppet and prime that pump, along with simply already having a user base.
Nothing very special about those shortcuts. Had they had a standalone system, it's not be much better than all the other attempts. This is akin to how Snoy launched the playstation.
I feel like there's some room for an invite-only period that's useful, but it needs to be short. Unless you've somehow got an amazingly complete test suite, you're likely to run into scaling problems and show stopper bugs with early users, and limiting user count temporarily allows you to see and fix some of those before you become known for your failure conditions. But you also don't want to linger in invite-only, and lose the hype. IMHO, maybe 2-6 weeks of invite only is fine.
Gmail's initial period was brilliant from a social network period before social networks. After the initial beta phase, once the bugs were worked out, it was invite only from existing Gmail users
Difference is that email doesn't have any network lock-in. If I'm the only one with a gmail.com account I'm the cool kid who can email everyone still on hotmail and yahoo to make them jealous, and now they want an invite as well. If I'm the only one with a bluesky account then I'm just...shouting into the void and no one cares.
I don't know about this. I got onto Facebook circa 2007 when it expanded from Harvard to other universities and man did I love it for a few years. Facebook really ended up being a major extension of my college experience. That was when it was just students, and it really had that new freshman undergrad social feel to it where it was all about linking up with new people you just met and seeing what they're up to and flirting and sharing pics and planning events.
I kind of feel like Google was onto something with the "circles" idea and it's not clear to me why something like that didn't catch on. I don't want to share everything with the whole world. My college friends, my professional contacts, my family - these are all social circles that I'd want to be connected to with a service like this, but in separate buckets that don't overlap (or only somewhat overlap).
So from a user's point of view, exclusive/invite-only can be really appealing. But if you're thinking from a "make as much money for the company as possible" point of view then yeah anything that limits the number of potential customers you can attract is going to hurt.
Facebook was never exactly "invite only" but when they started it was limited to certain universities, and they expanded gradually. If a social network is only going to have a few user it can still provide value if they all have something in common; better 1,000 users all in the same city/university than 10,000 users scattered across the globe. Threads doesn't have this problem since they can just do a full-court-press immediately and get 30M users in a few days. I dunno how bluesky works but if they are reasonably generous with the invites you can get your friends on it (who are interested) pretty quickly.
I've seen the belief that Google Plus failed because of the long invite-only limited access period repeated here many times - if that theory is correct, Bluesky seems to be making the exact same mistake with their launch.
It's certainly why it failed within the circles I was in. People with access in the early days didn't have enough invites to migrate existing communities - even very small ones.
A better solution is to require two invites to sign up. And then the service provider hands out double the number of invites. But now every new user has at least 2 existing contacts on the service - so their first experience is more than just saying "hi" to the only person they know there.
I think that would be impactful, but would still create barriers to entry. I'm not one to beg for invites, so I have a hard enough time casually finding one invite, let alone two. I'd imagine a good portion of invites would get stuck in purgatory waiting for a second, all while the potential user moves on to the next thing that grabs their curiosity.
What about one invite to create an account, a second to participate?
I'm not sure if this is the reason, but BlueSky doesn't appear to have a trust/safety moderation team that can operate at full scale. I mean, neither does twitter, but Jack understands that some people do want that. On the other hand, it's much easier for Meta to launch since they already have those people in place for Instagram and Facebook.
Moderation is a key feature of the MVP. If a horde of n-word spewing, cp posting spambots is the image that gets shared on newssites, it's dead in the water.
I actually don’t hate the idea but it’s the rigid sticking to it that’s the dumb part. The rate limiting clusterfuck was such a perfect opportunity to go “OK everyone here’s a hundred invites valid for the next 48 hours go wild”. Still feels like a club since you have to get an invite and creates an impetus on users to get these invites sent out ASAP.
I actually figured that this was the strategy, but now that they let that golden moment pass them by I now realise that nobody there has any idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Guess Jack just wants it to be a haven for all the worst blue checkmark behaviour of Twitter, in which case I commend him for creating a containment website.
BlueSky never had a chance, same goes for Threads. It's not some mistake in strategy, it just turns out you can't launch a copycat social network no matter how good your marketing/funding... network effects are tough.
They aren't failing due to privacy, or invite strategy, or anything else. They are failing because there's no differentiation whatsoever. It's so simple, and it's been true since forever.
The meme that Twitter is burning down is cope. The only people for whom it's burning down are extremely online liberals. And even they are not leaving Twitter. They are the only ones praying for these alternatives to succeed, or in recent HN threads asserting the downfall is assured and imminent. The actual ground truth of using Twitter if you aren't extremely online and praying on political rivals' downfall is that it basically hasn't changed much at all.
You need to differentiate, be cool, and be fun in some new way to leap past immense network effects. And probably also guarantee revenue share through a sort of decentralized network.
Bluesky, even with all the hype, is very disappointing. Days go by before I see a new post. And they invited an odd bunch of unhinged, very-online people. It would do them better to have done more “normals” there.
This is the opposite of my experience, my feeds refresh constantly. Are you just looking at just who you are following, or did you subscribe to any of the custom feeds like "What's Hot Classic" or "Gardening"?
Rushing it out the door when there is a massive Twitter (and to a lesser extent Reddit) population that is ready to jump ship now seems like the right move to me. You can always add features after, you can't ask for better timing than this.
It’s actually crazy how slow bluesky’s rollout has been. I can see why they want some level of exclusivity (so that people want to join, and when they join can immediately hook up with their friend who invited them), but they really need to open the faucet a bit.
Surprise! 30 million people wanted to join BlueSky because they wanted a twitter alternative that wasn't filled with hate fill toxic weirdo's. Now Meta's got em.
4D chess move there guys.
I feel the same way. I read one thread where someone was praising the app’s “refined” design. My first thought was, “What are they talking about. The UX is refined because there’s literally nothing here”. It’s just one feature, the MVP, posts/replies.
It would not surprise me if two weeks ago they were not planning on this release and t was only the recent drama that influenced them to release.
We'll never know if Elon would have shot himself more in the foot though without a clear competitive threat. Maybe some more time would have paid off? Though I agree that rate limiting + need to be signed in catastrophe over July 4 weekend seemed to be the sweet spot.
He can afford to sue himself, and even hire two very expensive law firms to represent both sides. He can even drag this case for decades, appealing court decisions and requesting expensive discovery, maybe even take it to supreme court.
Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder) worked at Twitter in the early days and he said that Jack was super smart and hard working which I doubt with all respect to the Twitter. He grandiosely failed at managing Vine which was supposed to be TikTok before TikTok. Vine could've been bigger money making machine that Twitter is or was. Also If I was Twitter CEO, I would've acquired popular blog platform Medium which was founded by Twitter co-founder and then I would build massive ad-network (Twitter, Vine and Medium) which could stand up against Facebook's and Google's ad business at least in the eyes of advertisers if not investors.
Also Zuckerberg wanted to acquire Twitter in the 2008 for $500m because in his paranoid head, he was scared that perhaps Twitter could overtake Facebook. Let me be clear, Zuckerberg is cutthroat competitor that doesn't care about anything except success. And looking at the Zuckerberg's track-record he won't let go this massive opportunity which is basically to kill off Twitter with Threads without much effort because Twitter is and was imploding for a very long time.
One side-note about Kevin Systrom; he said that back in the day when he co-founded Instagram, he didn't hear and know about AWS. So I must come to the conclusion in this ad-hoc way that not all successful founders know what they are doing and yea there is a lot of luck involved. And btw he is a Stanford graduate?! What is Stanford teaching these "kids"?
2) Zero downtime on a day 1 launch at the scale is a very impressive technical feat. If it had been rushed or released prematurely, this level of app stability would not have been the case. If I had to guess, this would be the reason why Bluesky hasn't been able to release to the general public
In terms of the app being a foundation that will be built on and cannibalize Twitter, I'm very bullish on the future for Threads!
I finally got an invite code to Bluesky the other day.
There is absolutely no content. Not as in “blank page nothing here” type of no content, I mean as in the “open the fridge, look around, and decide there’s nothing to eat” type of no content.
Meanwhile, Threads is content rich and there’s already people I know posting cool stuff to see and interact with.
The result, is that I don’t give a fuck about Bluesky, and I’m not going to bother spreading invite codes.
If I get at least 20 upvotes on this comment though maybe I’ll consider it since it means the interest is there.
Why has everyone on here been comparing Threads to Twitter when threads.com literally says its a Slack alternative for makers? The product has absolutely nothing to do with a Twitter style social network.
Edit: lol so FAANG just steals any and all actively used product names now. Got it.
Not sure how A C, D are relevant, trademarks pertain only to a specific category. Meta Threads was trademarked for luggage and backpacks. It'll be interesting to see if threads.com has a trademark.
One Google Play Store, Threads the chat app has "not affiliated with Threads by Instagram" in their listing. I wonder if they are getting lots of downloads by confused people.
Mark zuckerberg has literally built a monopoly of social media, lmao. At this point, since they've acquired such a large amount of users (2 billion), they can release anything and people will use it.
What I don't understand is why Bluesky didn't seize the opportunity first. People were literally banging on their doors begging to be let in and they continued to go "sorry we are exclusive, invites only". Now no one gives a shit.