Two weeks after Meta released Threads, a rival to Twitter, and saw record-breaking user signups, the craze surrounding the app seems to have subsided.
User interaction on Threads has declined after reaching 100 million user sign-ups in less than a week. According to a survey released this week by web traffic research company Similarweb, the number of daily active users on Threads decreased from 49 million on July 7, two days after its introduction, to 23.6 million users last Friday. Over the same period, the average time spent using the app decreased from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.
The slowness foreshadows the difficulties Meta will have as it works to not only entice people away from Twitter but also develop a service that caters to a far bigger audience. Threads is already dealing with some of the typical problems that social media platforms frequently experience, such as spam, user retention, and some early regulatory scrutiny of its approach to content control. Additionally, it’s unclear how much money Meta will truly make back from investing in constructing Threads.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, wrote on the social media site on Monday, “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together.” “Early growth was out of this world, but what’s more important is that tens of millions of people come back every day. The remainder of the year will be devoted to strengthening the fundamentals and retention.
Early on after Threads’ release, Meta officials admitted that it is much simpler to convince customers to join up for a hot new app than to persuade them to stay engaged there over time. That’s probably even more true for Threads, which debuted as a really basic app in an attempt to take advantage of Twitter’s vulnerability and also tapped into Instagram’s network to speed up sign-in.
A translation button, a tab on user’s activity feeds displaying who has followed them, and the opportunity to subscribe to and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow are among the first wave of upgrades Threads sent out to the iOS version of the app on Tuesday.
Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram who is in charge of Threads, has also made hints about intentions to include features including a desktop version of the app, a feed of just the accounts a user follows, and an edit button. The week before the app’s release, Mosseri wrote on Threads, “We’re clearly way over our skis on this.”
Meanwhile, Threads is battling spam, a problem that plagues many social networking platforms. Users have claimed that comments on posts are often filled with bogus links and “giveaways” that ask for more followers. Additionally, on Monday, Mosseri wrote on Threads that due to “an increase in spam attacks,” the platform would “need to get tighter on things like rate limits.”
In the future, this “is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” Mosseri said. “Let us know if you get caught up in those protections,” it said.
Mosseri’s message appears to refer to restrictions on users’ capacity to submit or read content, but Meta declined to elaborate or provide any other information. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, responded to the comment with some humor after criticism of Twitter’s own rate limits—restrictions on how many tweets users can read—helped drive Threads’ early growth.
