Oh dear, Threads seems to be unravelling fast

When Meta launched Threads, uptake seemingly eclipsed even the epic launch of ChatGPT: 30 million users in the first 24 hours, more than 100 million in five days… the talk was that the Twitter-killer was here, a new microblogging app that had taken advantage of Elon Musk’s numerous mistakes to blow the little blue bird out of the water and take all that advertising revenue for itself.

Back in the real world, it was Elon Musk himself who killed the little blue bird, as part of a radical rebranding process that broke all the rules of marketing (the man who owns the world’s biggest mouthpiece plays by different rules).

Meanwhile, users have been steadily leaving Meta’s Threads: first half of them, and at this point, more than 100 million, leaving around 12.6 million, turning its supposed success into another of the company’s many failures: the vast majority of those who opened an account on Threads have already stopped using it. Setting up a microblogging app is not that simple, and generally, copying things blatantly, and adding Meta’s content control rules to them has not been a success. There’s more than one phase to technology adoption, and as we are seeing, an initial explosive growth guarantees absolutely nothing. Rushing out a clone of something, leaving out features like hashtags, trending topics, the ability to see updates you’ve…