Honestly surprised there are no ads yet. I thought that was the whole point of the website…
They need to make it nice first, to reel people in. Once they are in and invested, that’s when ads start.
Hey, I’ve seen that one!
It’s a classic (enshittification tactic)
Well that sounds enshitty.
wait till you see the -ification.
that’s when they start filtering out the genuine content and show you mostly promoted stuff
Yep. that’s the classic shitty business model
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Make a site that’s attractive to use for a lot of people
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Once you have enough people, lock in the users with network effect, walled garden, etc
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Use the users to draw in businesses
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Lock in the businesses and squeeze them for profit.
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Squeeze users and businesses for money, abandon any maintenance and improvement on the site except for monetization.
It’s the 3 D’s.
- Develop the product
- Draw people in
- Dump a nice steamy log on the whole thing
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They have to build social inertia first. This is something Facebook figured out a long time ago and is well-documented. They were begging for money from investors to keep the site running and Zuck refused to run ads because the site was still growing like crazy.
It might be years yet before they start running ads but rest assured they will eventually.
You don’t raise temperature while the frog is in the pond.
I don’t understand this metaphor. Is it about frog breeding for later eating? Why else would you want to heat your pond, irrespective of the frog. And why is there a greater incentive to heat the pond when there’s no frog, and vice versa? So many questions!
I interpreted it as you don’t heat the pot while the frog is still in the pond. You only apply heat slowly once the front is already in the pot.
Don’t load up the ads until the users are already on Threads. Wait until they are active on Threads, then crank up the ads when it’s more difficult for the users to leave.
There was an experiment once where it was determined that a frog with it’s brain removed wouldn’t jump out of slowly heated water but would reflexively jump if placed into already hot water, leading to a myth that a frog won’t leave boiling water if heated gradually enough.
Idioms around frog boiling generally means to make changes slowly and gradually enough that there is minimal reaction from affected parties.
Google slow boiling frog
And this is why it’s not a good idea to federate with Threads.
On the contrary, that’s how you get an ad-free access to Threads content.
Ads don’t federate.
That’s why they have stealth enshittification techniques to disguise them.
That’s why they have stealth enshittification techniques to disguise them.
Promotional posts don’t magically show up on Mastodon for users who don’t follow the brand account that posted them. That’s not how Mastodon works.
If I were to follow Marvel Comics via Mastodon, boosted a post, then my followers would see the post, just as they would see the post if I made a screenshot from a Marvel tweet and posted that to Mastodon but Marvel posts would not just show up for random Mastodon users just because Marvel paid Meta to promote a post on Threads. Only Threads website and app users would see such posts.
It’s amazing how uninformed Fediverse users are of the basics of how the Fediverse works.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how you are getting downvoted for saying this in various comments.
Are people actually worried they would would see straight up ads coming into their mastodon feeds if their server federates with Threads? That’s a pretty wild assumption to make.
If you follow the Coke brand account, then you’ll see Coke brand posts (even then I wouldn’t consider those “ads” in a traditional sense), but if you follow MBKHD or, hell, the Barack Obama account you won’t have a sudden influx of ads for Pepsi or whatever in your feed.
Are people actually worried they would would see straight up ads coming into their mastodon feeds if their server federates with Threads? That’s a pretty wild assumption to make.
Not only are they worried, they think that this is a foregone conclusion. They think it’s more important to block Threads preemptively than to actually make an informed decision … looking if Meta would actually somehow misuse federation and then block them, should that happen. I’ve seen Lemmy instances block Threads before they block any neo-nazi and pedo instances. Seriously, WTF. The hysteria is insane. Threads content can’t currently even show up on Lemmy.
I mean they do. And I’m sure they will. But as long as you’re not using Threads they can’t be pushed into your feed.
I assume in the future there will probably be an option to “block Threads accounts except the ones that I specifically follow”.
This is how the protocol works.
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You only get content from those you follow (in your home feed).
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Your server’s local feed will contain all posts made by users on your server.
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Your server’s global feed will contain all posts from users someone on your server follows.
Note how #3 isn’t actually a global feed. Spin up your own server at home and it will be the same as your home feed when you’re the only users.
Even if you federate with Threads, there’s simply no way for them to “inject ads” into any of these feeds.
That’s what I said
Sorry, I forgot to make it clear that the point was that your “maybe in the future…” is already the same as how it works now. No difference.
Not necessarily. I follow hashtags. Hashtags have been known to be abused by advertisers. If an advertiser uses a hashtag that I follow, it will appear in my feed. In my example, that wouldn’t be possible.
They can also appear in the “explore” section if it received sufficient engagement.
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Tomorrow.
That’s when.
Stop using meta services.
Don’t worry, Threads Pro will have you covered for an ad reduction for 3.99/mo.! And Threads Pro Plus for 5.99/mo. will get rid of them all by 2030!
Your prices are optimistically low. They’ll probably be double that and lock features behind the more expensive plan.
We know what enshittification looks like now. Just because you restart it doesn’t mean it’s not obvious where it ends up.
‘no immediate timeline’ toward monetization
Soo, starting tomorrow
I don’t get why anyone even uses it. There are other better options that aren’t run by Facebook.
It’s an awareness thing. Everyone uses it because everyone else uses it, because it’s the main one people know about, because Meta has unlimited money to market it and scale it, which are exorbitantly expensive.
Most people are some combination of lazy, uninformed, stressed, and stupid. Can’t think long term, just trying to get to tomorrow.
Not complicated.
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The value of any social network is its’ users more than anything. They’ll use it in spite of it being super shitty if the people they want to follow are on it.
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Threads basically created “one-click account creation” with Instagram so the onboarding was seamless.
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They capitalized on the Muskification of Twitter.
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Lmao, called it
Tried Threads briefly. It’s full of the same people who comment on or create Facebook reels. Insta-political trolling, deliberately wrong info just to get people to comment and correct it, “I’m stupidly out of the loop on this ridiculously popular topic, can someone tell me why [thing] is?” Just to get every know-it-all to reply. Like every low-effort post on Reddit ever.
Couple that with the inability to sort, and the inability for notifications to take you to the post you were having a discussion on, and I gave up after about 3-4 days.
The platform sucks and so do the participants.
I used it early on and at that point no one had heard of it and it was full of really cool people with good discourse. But then corporations and the rest of the riff-raff found it and it turned into what you saw it as.
The only way to keep something good is to not let it become popular.
I have tried Threads, and I really can’t recall when was the last time I wasn’t impressed at all by something.
This doesn’t help.the situation at all.
Hell, Musk’s Twitter is a better option to explore than Threads.
I never tried threads even tho it was only popular for 2 weeks
People use threads in 2024?
Couldn’t I just block whatever account throws in advertising?
