this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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That’s the reason the product exists for. They have to increase the value for their shareholders.
As a consumer why would you care about a corporations finances? That is their problem to figure out. As a consumer you are trying to find value for you personally. Does this solve a problem in my life? Am I better off with this thing than without it? Is the cost worth it, be it monetary or privacy?
Maybe not for you.
Okay. Let’s take a step back and try to see what is the problem statement and the market opportunity here.
Opportunity: Twitter has gone down. People are looking for alternatives. At one hand, you have Mastadon but it is not easy to use. On the other, you have Threads - seamless to use as long as you already had Instagram.
Need: Was there one? Not really. The opportunity above created the need.
Moat: Instagram is very YOU presence oriented. Let’s agree that it was not supposed to be a communication platform. Then influencers came in, influencer marketing became a thing, live video chats came in. All of this requires YOU to put your face forward on a camera.
Now comes Thread - no need to do anything. Put down a thread. Start a conversation. That’s all. If you want, there is an easy cross share to Instagram. Influencers are going to milk it. Ads impressions combined over both the apps will increase thus
Result: Increasing the revenue for Meta and as a result, benefiting the shareholders.
It is not about I caring about it. It’s about how they ensure that you develop just a habit of checking - that is all. You sticking does everything for them, and not it does not even have to add that much of a value.
Cost? Privacy matters to you then yes. The problem now a days is that FOMO gets the best of people.
Sorry for the long message. Thanks in case you stayed with me until the end. 😅
I'm not seeing the connection between someone deciding to use Threads or not and caring if it makes more money than Twitter. The financial success of it isn't a consideration in whether or not someone would use it. It's user count and perceived longevity might, but those are only tangentially related to its financial situation.
So we’re not all here because of a corporations decisions on how to make money?
But this is not for the user to worry about in the first place. Why do you think that would the case? It’s a free to use platform for everyone.
More than the user count, you would looking at user retention. More retention would automatically mean more impressions for everything that already is on Instagram - this is the corporation POV.
Isn't that what this thread is talking about and suggesting? We have this news article on the BBC asking whether or not Threads can make more money than Twitter as if the consumer cares about the answer to that question.
Your average Joe may not. But if you look at the basics - this was launched to make money, so of course, there would be discussions around the revenue it generates.
I mean, you would pay like a Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music a subscription amount to use it, but you still won’t care how much money they make. But the market does that’s all. 😅
And how do you increase retention? Induce addiction and FOMO, promote rage bait, fake news... anything that creates engagement, no matter the side effects to the users.
We have seen how this all works, so yes, it is something to worry about.
That’s it.
We know how Meta has run. We have all been raging Facebook user at one point in time. They need you to come back and re- activate you. Another interesting thing to see would be how many dormant Facebook users get re- activated for Meta now that Threads is here.
This is a story about how two companies aim to make revenue from its users. It’s precisely about many of those issues.
It’s an important question. The reason that many of us are is down to the way one corporation decided to monetise.
Also, the BBC has already done stories about the Threads UX
One reason we care about this is because we can choose to or to not purchase small fractions of these public companies and become partial owners. This information is useful in making investment decisions.
Increasing “value” for shareholders in spite of user experience should be a reason to be sent to the guillotine.
In al seriousness now, being profitable is ok, but these companies try to be ever more profitable while not giving a flying fuck about the impact they have.
How do you define impact here?
The user below failed to mention Meta is indirectly responsible for an actual Genocide through their purposeful lack of oversight and endless desire for engagement at no matter the cost.
Increasing the echo chambers of conspiracy theorists, extremist and with that influencing things like elections seems quite the impact to me. All these mega corporations could’ve tried to limit these things, but probably that would’ve looked bad on their balance sheets.
Add to this the insane amount of data harvesting they do on their users and in general just making every damn platform worse from year to year while only looking for ever more profits.
Your comment reminds me that this headline is speaking to boomers. Where I, with direct experience using these shitty platforms, don’t give a shit if either live or die