Threads hits 175 million users after a year

Threads looks like Twitter, but is in fact a very different product: Threads is solidly planted in the upper right. When you log onto the app for the first time, your feed is populated by the algorithm; there is some context given by whom you follow on Instagram, but Meta seems aware that accounts you might want to look at may be different than acc... See more

Threads is adding view counts. This is probably a good place to put that my Threads referral traffic has completely cratered, as I knew it would. The decision to show view counts is, I assume, part of the typical Meta tactic to get people to care more about on-site engagement that any kind of real traffic.

An incumbent like Meta - with its cash cow “blue app” and Instagram, and its under monetized other products - is an interesting player in the metaverse because it can afford to experiment with new monetization models and user-incentives under some of its massive digital-first product lines (Oculus, Whatsapp, and Messenger), without jeopardizing its... See more

It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company. But Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks — even if it means that someday a disgruntled Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to anoth... See more

Threads is a cool new hangout — if you’re a brand. The app launched backwards compared to other social media apps: Rather than the users finding communities and building spaces before the brands made their grand entrance, the brands appeared on the app in its early days. When users came to the app, they were greeted with a brand playground, like th... See more