310 points

Typical fear of missing out behavior. Folks flock to Threads to see what it’s all about, see that it actually sucks, and bail.

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85 points

Yeah FOMO is a helluva drug. I’d be willing to bet that while there are plenty of users on the newplaform, people actually posting is not there yet, and with the lack of content for users to doom scroll they’re hopping back to whatever app they came from. Most people don’t give two shits about actually engaging with a given userbase, they just want to doom scroll content and zone out.

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27 points

Why did they start calling it “Doom scrolling?”

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52 points

It’s generally when you’re stuck in a loop of reading negative posts/articles. I think the phenomenon comes from how when you read a negative article/piece of news you feel down, so you want to scroll further in the hopes of seeing something positive to lift your spirits. But then of course it’s only more negativity, and so you keep going. And the algorithms of Twitter/Facebook knows this, so they don’t tend to help you find something positive.

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8 points

I think alot of it relates to just scrolling through news and wanting more content/headlines. It’s not that users are necessarily seeking out bad news or “doom”, it’s just that, given the state of the world today <motions broadly>, that’s what a lot of the news ends up being. I think I often engage in “doomscrolling”, but I’m not doing it because I want to see bad news, I’m an information addict and I’m just trying to get as much content as I can. Reddit fed that habit well, but I’ve moved on from there. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing if Lemmy can’t feed that addiction, not seeing new content pushes me off and forces me back into the real world or on to other sites/apps. I’m fine with that, I hated my constant need to flip through Reddit whenever I was bored before.

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7 points

I prefer Doom Metal.

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7 points

It’s been a thing for a while, basically just mindlessly scrolling for hours on end on a neverending feed

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2 points

Covid era when many people had nothing to do, were more worried and anxious than usual, and the internet seemed full of concerning and bad news. The term has never meant that much to me personally. I’ve only regular scrolled.

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3 points

I also think that there were linch pins with in the threads app, people followed shadow accounts for there friends etc. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if alot of those friends then didn’t get the app, making said shadow follow pointless

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20 points

I wouldn’t say its FOMO, I think most people just had higher hopes for it as a direct Twitter replacement instead of the cesspool of reposters, uninteresting celebs, and wylin’ out social media managers that it serves up in its feed. I don’t mind Meta, I don’t mind that they want to eventually federate, I just wish the feed wasn’t pure trash.

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2 points

All the celeb shit is the number 1 reason I always hated these platforms. I also feel like the only people somewhat defending twitter are those with a large following/celebrity status

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1 point

That could be I guess.

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1 point

What you described isn’t FOMO, that’s just curiosity. Just checking out a new popular app and then just not using it due to a lack of engagement.

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155 points

In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week

Don’t fact check me I pulled this out my ass

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33 points

Fact checked. Your ass contents appear to be statistically correct.

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28 points

I checked his ass. It indeed is empty now so he did recently pull something out.

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27 points
*

I choose to believe this. Have a good day.

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16 points

that’s some serious good-ass news good ass-news

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9 points

Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/37/

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14 points

lemmy doesn’t have this kind of data because we don’t have the zucc in our asses.

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129 points

They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.

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83 points

What new personal information did meta get from Instagram users enabling threads?

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71 points

The real answer is nothing, assuming they already had an Instagram account. People are all up in arms, but the majority of ‘signups’ were just people clicking the activation button as opposed to creating a new account.

That said, I currently will praise anything that takes more users away from Twitter. Lesser of two evils and all that.

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39 points

Not that I disagree much, but… what a world we live in where Meta is the lesser of two evils

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8 points

As LTT said. Threads is the result of the Zuck flicking his tongue out and tasting blood.

But I mean we (society, not me, miss me with that) are still clearly subscribing to a social media site run by the lizard people and calling it an improvement.

Which says a lot.

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6 points

Zuck is not a lesser evil. He’s the same evil. And Jeffrey bezos this week is having a laugh because nobody’s paying attention to him at the moment.

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9 points

I’m going to assume not all new users were Instagram users.

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1 point

Pretty sure all new users are required to have an Instagram? I know for sure the two are linked. No deleting Threads without deleting your Insta.

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3 points

Also Facebook

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3 points

Health history and fitness status

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7 points

Instagram doesn’t already collect that?

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4 points

I feel like what you’re talking about is complaining about someone taking a dump on another, much larger pile of crap.

If you were already on Instagram that ship has sailed.

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2 points

At least, they entertained me during a week or so.

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1 point

They got nothing new. Just a few shitposts from Instagram users saying “I’m on Threads.”

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109 points

“Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days.”

LOL The biggest bullshit of the year… Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent…

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32 points

100 million isn’t that much when it comes to Meta. There’s over 2 billion “active” Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.

I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.

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64 points

Your maths is a little off there: 100m is 5%

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35 points

IT’S JUST A FEW DECIMAL PLACES GIVE ME A BREAK 😆

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5 points

while you’re correct based on instagram’s numbers, the other commenter would be correct if it was a British billion which is a million millions. just a fun fact 🦄

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17 points

Eh… Check your math…

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3 points

Right? Seems like he is off by a couple digits, unless we are missing something

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10 points

where have you found 2x10^12 people

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4 points

Well, technically… they said “users”, not “people”. Maybe there are 2E12-1E8 bots… 🙃

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14 points
*

Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are

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-4 points
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Deleted by creator
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14 points

Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?

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20 points
*

people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.

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25 points

It’s not hard to understand what was happening.

  • I follow Person A and Person A follows me on Instagram
  • Person A signs up for Threads before me
  • I sign up for Threads after
  • Because we already follow each other on Instagram, Threads automatically made Person A follow me

The issue with the EU is you can’t mingle and mix user data from two separate services.

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8 points

“An account was already created for them” because it’s the same Meta account. You can just follow people when you start your account without them necessarily activating threads.

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5 points

Sole benefit of Brexit identified. We get to hand over our data to meta before you guys. It’s all been worth it.

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2 points

I saw this in browser: You can go the person Instagram account and see if they have a thread logo next to it.

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4 points

Not to mention all the spam bots they fail to actually ban after multiple people report.

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4 points

Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it’s bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator AI teams

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0 points
*

Wasn’t it announced to be the case? So it’s “just” without consent, which is already bad enough.

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69 points

It’s Google Plus all over again.

If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don’t like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.

It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.

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69 points
*
Deleted by creator
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7 points

Mastodon is almost all 40yo white guys. Source: am one

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5 points

And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.

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7 points

I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don’t like who’s running the bird app. "

But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it’s the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.

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4 points

Just to point out many ex-Digg users are 30-40 years old. I would agree a 40yo normie who only use Facebook wouldn’t know about Reddit.

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0 points

I’d say a lot of these 40 yo on Facebook actually got on reddit during the QAnon nonsense.

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6 points

Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example …

The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next “social media” attempt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy

As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement’s privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.

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11 points

IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to “join a group”.

I don’t think people understood it well, though.

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1 point

Mastodon sort of has this.

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1 point

It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.

I’m never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn’t really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don’t share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can’t stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.

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8 points

All social media based in the U.S. share information to the three letter agency, confirmed by the NSA leaks.

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-1 points

I trust America more than China. If some foreign government has to have my data, I’d rather it be America.

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3 points

Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven’t been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you’ve previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).

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3 points

YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.

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2 points
*

Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn’t care much about what data the CCP has on you.

Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.

Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so… Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB…

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-2 points

lol dumbest post i read on this site this week. log off and seek therapy

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