July 31, 2023
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the company’s new social media platform, Threads, has lost more than half of its users.
Threads was launched earlier this month and quickly attracted more than 100 million users. However, those numbers have since tumbled. In a call to employees, Zuckerberg said that the situation was “normal” and that he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
Threads was criticized for the limited functionality it had when it launched. Meta has since added new features, such as separate “following” and “for you”‘ feeds, and increased scope to translate posts into different languages. The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff that it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform. He gave the example of “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads”.
Zuckerberg also updated employees on the company’s enormous bet on a yet-to-be-created virtual reality world, called the Metaverse. He said work on the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology that would power it was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track”, adding that he didn’t anticipate it going mainstream until the next decade.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.
