Two hours after Mark Zuckerberg hit the fire button on Threads, Instagram’s new app for real-time public conversations, on Wednesday release More than two million people have downloaded his latest work.
That’s just the beginning.
After another two hours, five million people The thread has been downloaded. By the time Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to bed on Wednesday night, downloads had soared to 10 million. When he woke up Thursday morning, the app had been downloaded more than 30 million times, he said.
In less than a day, Threads, designed to rival Twitter, appears to have become the fastest-downloading app ever. According to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, it easily surpassed the chatbot ChatGPT, which was downloaded 1 million times within five days of its release. Threads are surpassing 100 million users In two months, it was a feat only ChatGPT could achieve, according to analytics firm Similarweb.
Some of Twitter’s most followed users, such as Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira, and Oprah Winfrey, immediately joined Threads and started posting. The atmosphere was lively, with users writing welcome messages and expressing a desire to read each other’s posts. At one point, the new app was shaky with too many users.
“It’s off to a good start as we hope!” Zuckerberg, whose company owns Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp, said in a thread on Thursday. He later added, “It felt like the beginning of something special.”
The early momentum underscores a desire to find an alternative to Twitter, the 17-year-old digital town square that has long been a central place for the public’s online conversation. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, the billionaire has enacted changes that have angered longtime users of the social platform, especially those who dislike his laissez-faire approach to content moderation. Twitter also suffered more outages and bugs.
Musk didn’t sit idly by Zuckerberg’s actions. In a letter on Wednesday, Twitter’s lawyers threatened legal action against Meta, accusing it of using former employees’ trade secrets to build Threads. Twitter also asked Meta to keep internal documents related to the dispute between the two companies.this letter is reported earlier By Semafort.
“Competition is good, cheating is not,” Mr Musk said tweet Thursday.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey also criticized Zuckerberg’s new app. “We wanted flying cars, but instead we got 7 Twitter clones,” he tweeted Thursday.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone (Andy Stone) said in the Threads post that there are no former Twitter engineers working on Threads. “That’s not a problem at all,” he wrote.
Threads was an unexpected hit for Meta, which desperately needed a win after coming under scrutiny for spreading misinformation and other toxic content across the internet. While Zuckerberg’s social network was lauded in its inception, in recent years it has come under fire from regulators, activists and users unhappy with the way the company handles data and its products. Meta also faces skepticism about its entry into the still-emerging immersive digital world, the so-called Metaverse.
But this week has been a reprieve — at least briefly — for Zuckerberg and company. Inside Meta on Wednesday night, employees cheered the launch of Threads, sharing inside jokes and memes with each other, according to screenshots of conversations seen by The New York Times.
After a year of layoffs and austerity, morale is high within the company, one employee noted. Another netizen shared a meme of two characters from the 1999 film “The Mummy,” telling each other that Twitter has been “replaced by Meta,” according to screenshots.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Threads was an emergency project spun out of Instagram seven months ago when the company decided to “take a bet” and challenge Twitter.
The project, code-named “Project 92,” is a closely guarded secret, two of the people said. The team was small, and the rest of Meta didn’t have access to the initial version of the app, they said.
Celebrities, brands and influencers have been given early access to the app for the past few days, a move by Meta aimed at kickstarting a culture of entertainment and discussion on a whim. Mr Mosseri said he wanted Threads to be a “friendly place” for public dialogue.
“You can’t get enough of your posts,” actress Jennifer Lopez said in the post, adding a musical note emoji. Ms DeGeneres wrote in her first Threads post: “Welcome to Gay Twitter!”
However, this early momentum does not necessarily translate into long-term engagement and success. Twitter remains the leader, with more than 237 million daily users, according to the most recent public figures the company cited last year. Meta also continues to face questions about its data privacy policies.
Some Threads users were also put off by an issue where they might need to delete the connected Instagram account if they wanted to delete their Threads account. Instagram said it was working on alternatives for Threads users to deactivate their accounts.
Zuckerberg said Instagram appears to be taking a hands-on approach to determining what can and cannot be posted to Threads in order to create a “friendly” conversation app.
Across the app, Threads obscured some posts behind warning boxes indicating that the content had been “reviewed by independent fact-checkers” and ruled misleading. Users can click a button on the alert box to display the content. Another pop-up box contains a brief description of why the content was suppressed and a link to the post by the fact-checker who made the verdict.
The thread also seems to hide some comments entirely. “Is Meta censoring conservative ideas here too?” asked right-wing influencer Tomi Lahren in his first post on the app — a rebuttal to his past efforts to moderate false and misleading content. attacks on mainstream social networks. At the bottom of the comments section of her post, a label appeared that read: “Some replies are not available.”
Another warning appears when users try to follow some influencers that Meta has previously flagged for posting false or misleading content.
“Are you sure you want to follow?” the warning asked. “The account has repeatedly posted false information that has been reviewed by an independent fact checker or violates our Community Guidelines.” The same warning appeared when trying to follow the users’ Instagram profiles.
For new Threads users like Kate Stone, a 63-year-old lawyer from North Carolina, proper content moderation is important. She has a dormant Twitter account and dreamed of owning a Tesla (Musk’s electric car), but when the tech billionaire started tweeting more politically conservative messages, she Gave up on those two things. But she wanted to participate in public conversations online, and she thought Threads might be a way to do that.
“I’ve read about Threads and I’m not a big fan of Zuckerberg, but I found that if you have an Instagram account, it’s easy to do,” Ms. Stone said in an interview. “So I thought I’d give it a try.”
Stuart Thompson and Cade Mays contributed to the report.
