Latest / Radio Baloney - The Richie Baloney Show! / Meta's Threads App Is Failing
Transcript
- 0:00As you know, there is nothing that enrages the modern leftist more than free
- 0:05speech. And so the left, and that includes much of the journalistic class,
- 0:09and of course establishment figures were apoplectic with rage when Elon Musk bought Twitter
- 0:15and announced that it would be a free speech platform. Now, although Elon
- 0:20has not been absolutely perfect on that front, he has still delivered more free
- 0:25speech than they are comfortable with. And so when Mark Zuckerberg announced a new
- 0:30social media platform, they dubbed it the Twitter Killer. A place where left
- 0:35wing narratives and magical thinking would conquer all, a place where everything that the
- 0:41government tells you is true, everybody's been triple boosted, and red hats are
- 0:46illegal. And so the celebrations began here from the Guardian, Twitter Killer,
- 0:53thread zapp hits one hundred million sign ups in less than five days. Now.
- 0:58I made a video about why threads would fail when this all started,
- 1:02and by fail, I meant it would not overtake, it would not displace
- 1:06Twitter as the digital public square. And it looks like I was right.
- 1:11Threads unraveling Traffic on Zuckerberg's Twitter alternative plummets in second week, says on Friday,
- 1:18as Threads suffered. Musk announced that Twitter usage was up three point five
- 1:23percent week over week. Says within forty eight hours of launching on July fifth,
- 1:27Mark Zuckerberg's Threads managed to bring in one hundred million users, making it
- 1:33the fastest growing application in history. The initial fanfare was short lived, however,
- 1:38and Meta's Twitter alternative has been on a downward spiral ever since. Data
- 1:45collected by similar Web has revealed that traffic on Threads has decreased by more than
- 1:51fifty percent in its second week of operation, though the numbers only reflect Android
- 1:57users, Apple is scheduled to provide figures for Eiffel users in the coming weeks.
- 2:00I wouldn't expect it to be any different. And it says that Threads
- 2:05had more than forty nine million active daily users on its busiest day, July
- 2:09seventh, but by the following Friday that number had dipped to just twenty three
- 2:15point six million. Time spent also decreased from twenty minutes to five minutes over
- 2:21that same time period. So it had a huge start, one hundred million
- 2:23users. And why is that? Well, it's part of Meta. Meta
- 2:27owns Instagram and they made it very easy to sign up from Instagram, and
- 2:31that's one of the advantages of having this huge, developed infrastructure. But even
- 2:37with all of that, you still have to have something that people want.
- 2:40You have to offer something they're not getting anywhere else. So Threads signs up
- 2:46mostly Instagram users and a few rejects from Twitter, where they were desperate to
- 2:51find an echo chamber where they wouldn't hear anything that offended them ever again.
- 2:54But most of the people were Instagram users. And what do you do on
- 2:59Instagram, Well, you post photos of your lunch and your ass, and
- 3:02they've already got an app for that Instagram. If Threads wants to become the
- 3:07new public square for news and opinion, and remember Threads was supposed to displace
- 3:14Twitter, then the user base has to be interested in news and opinion,
- 3:17and they're not. They're interested in lunch and asses and I guess pictures of
- 3:23people on yachts. Now. The head of Instagram and Threads, Adam Mosseri,
- 3:28has said on many occasions that Threads has no plan to boaster news and
- 3:31political content, and I don't believe that at all. I think a big
- 3:37part of the plan for Threads is to install it as a reliable propaganda outlet
- 3:42for government agencies and legacy media. It says it's guidelines also force strict adherence
- 3:49to rules that stifle the explicit dark humor that most dedicated Twitter users enjoy.
- 3:54Now you want to see why it's not getting engagement where people aren't you using
- 4:00it? Well, it's not too difficult to see why. Additionally, users
- 4:03have complained that Thread's algorithm turns them off from using the app. Users can't
- 4:09customize their feed, They can't customize their feed, and can only peruse content
- 4:15from random accounts they don't follow. Even worse, there's no way to change
- 4:18this issue within the app. Threads algorithm shows uses a mix of content from
- 4:24people they follow and from people they don't to keep users engaged with the app,
- 4:29But for some the algorithm maybe having the opposite effect. Because everyone hopped
- 4:33on Threads at once with no real understanding of the app, there wasn't a
- 4:36lot of content to interact with. Of course, it was not surprising to
- 4:41see stories like this immediately as soon as Threads went online. Metta's Threads app
- 4:46already facing backlash for silencing conservatives days after launch. Metta also includes a message
- 4:53warning users when they follow certain accounts, including Donald Trump Junior. So yeah,
- 4:58you're not going to see many conservatives decide that this is the way forward.
- 5:01And without conservatives, well you've just got a left wing echo chamber.
- 5:04And like with Mastodon, which a few million at Twitter users went to after
- 5:09Elon Musk bought Twitter, it will just turn into a circular firing squad because
- 5:15without anybody else to hate, they will just turn on each other in a
- 5:18feedback loop of escalating virtue signals. And while that may be funny to watch,
- 5:24that's not a good business model anyway. That's all I got to say
- 5:26about that. Please subscribe, like and share. Sharing really helps me out.
- 5:30I thank you for doing that. I will see you next time.