Let's not forget that thread's data collection is so atrocious that it didn't launch in small and exotic markets like... Say.... The whole of the EU.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I sure wish the United States would write some pro-consumer privacy legislation...
But what about my Quarterly Profits!?!
Do you know how this works? I understood if you have Instagram a threads account is already created for you, but is it the App Store location you downloaded from or IP or user set location?
i imagine it’s just very straightforward based on your app store region, because if you spoof that then you’re probably already breaking some ToS so you have no legal ground to stand on
Is the law based on your geographical location or your citizenship? If I'm an EU citizen and travel to California, can these companies store/sell that California data differently? Also say while in Cali I download Threads. Does that mean they can continue to store my data when I return home to the EU?
For real?
Yep. One reason might be that FB just took a biiiig blow on their entire business model from the highest court in the EU (which came in front of court after an action by in turn the biggest sub-market (Germany)'s anti-trust watchdog bureau got active against them):
(Mirror)
Also a source for the actual claim from above:
Edit; also this: https://lemmy.world/post/1732201
Is this a surprise? User retention is hard, and I'd expect this to hit even harder as time goes by. It'll keep going up until the point where user growth matches attrition and I'd guess in the early days of a social platform, it's going to take a while for background growth to increase that much and attrition will be pretty high given the lack of attachment.
It's also worth mentioning that on launch day, people in Europe were able to access it via VPN (not sure how big of a number of users that was), but they've since blocked those users. I'm sure that's not a massive chunk, but it's a chunk nonetheless
How do you block people using a VPN by region? Just block the whole VPN?
Big companies like Facebook can just block IPs coming from the VPNs, it's not feasible for someone smaller but they could 100% do it
I'm probably one of those. I joined because it was a low hanging fruit for an instagram user. It is basically twitter culture all over again. People complain that you're just posting into a void on Mastodon but I get tons of responses over there. The real void is any mainstream social media where only the voice of influencers are amplified. The whole main feed is just 90% suggested posts. Why the fuck do I wanna see a post from Jake Paul or Mr. Beast?
My experience as well. I blitzed and grinded followers cuz it was easy and why not. My feed is okay in general, but I had to follower 1.5kish people to get it that way.
But I still get more than twice the engagement and meaningful engagement at that on Mastadon and Kbin, with less than half the followers. I also get little out of twitter, but I may be bad at it.
how do you grind followers
Put out robot bait and the follows just rack up.
what's the point of having robot followers tho
I feel like that's gotta be pretty normal for hyped up product launches, a lot of people just join to see what it is at first.
Honestly, keeping half is pretty good.
IKR? The massive influx of near-zero-friction signups is bound to create a large userbase of new/shiny window shoppers who quickly lose interest. I've got a couple of friends who seem to be attempting to create a presence there, but otherwise it's a terrible feed. Of course it's a terrible feed for me because I've done jack-shit on instagram and the algorithm is just throwing stuff at my wall to see what sticks. I've got ladies with large asses in spandex, some quote-meme spammers, and Jair Bolsonaro filling up my feed - that's just a fucking dumpster fire.
I'll keep the app (properly sandboxed) but I doubt I'll interact with it any more than mastodon or Post - which is monthly at best. I'd say that I dropper Twitter last year, but really I dropped it a decade ago as being useless as both a location for discourse and a source for, well, anything of interest to me.
Honestly, I'm surprised the algorithm doesn't start with more benign stuff. The best tuned algorithms start with low-controversy popular content, like pictures of cats, then slowly as it learns about the user begins introducing personal interests and rage bait depending on what the user interacts with.
Yeah, that really is pretty surprising. Haven't used Threads myself since I'm in the EU and I have zero interest in it, but this is pretty normal social media stuff. I'd understand it if Meta was some "two people and a dog" company, but it's Meta. I figure that a nontrivial amount of corners was cut, considering they couldn't even launch in the EU
Fediverse boycott did it!
Lol jk
Good news tho. Hope everyone over at zuck corp is starting to feel bad about themselves again.
boing boing sounds like a reliable source ...
The way journalists and brands flocked to Threads in the hopes that it would bring back the good old days? That wasn't healthy.
The article doesn't really explain why this is the case.
because it makes for a catchy phrase
If half of the users who tried it out stuck around, then they're incredibly successful.
I never used twitter, facebook or instagram or any of those social stuff except forums and slashdot or slashdot-likes. But I kinda don't mind tech companies launching shit like this every few months and see it dissolve into the sludge from which it came. I also wish sites like youtube and google the same fate... the sooner the better...
YouTube and Google are unlikely to fall, but when and if Google ever does so will YouTube. YouTube is a money pit and has no competitors because it's not viable, video hosting is too expensive relative to the money they make from the platform. Google has been seeding YouTube with capital from their own more successful services, but Google's search engine isn't nearly as good as it used to be and their cloud and web stuff isn't nearly as popular as Amazon or Microsoft, so we'll see.
I don't mean this comment to be facetious towards OP.
Seeing reports that interest died down on a newly released item, be it a game, social media, or tv series, is just to be expected. May as well report that water is still wet.
i’m just over here waiting for the federation to happen so i can spy on Threads stuff from the safety (and sanity) of my own mastodon instance ¯\(ツ)/¯
@igalmarino leave it to Fuckerberg to fuck up a simple task of making a privacy focused social media site. Idiots.
Why would any corporate anything want a privacy focused social media site? There's no way to extract data or money from it. It's not like they're in the game to give you a service you want to use. Just enough to keep you generating data so they can sell you.
That was never the goal.
I'd probably use it more if there was a browser/desktop app. But I've got like 1% as many followers there as I do on Mastodon, so I don't think I'd post anything regardless.
I use it to follow people I used to follow on Twitter that haven't done the Fediverse thing. I mostly just read though.
I hate the fact that there's no feed and I also hate that on Android when you switch back to the app it refreshes and jumps to the top so you can't find anything. :/