I downloaded Threads the night it went live, same as apparently 100 million other people did within five days. Two weeks later I opened it today and there was basically nothing there. No red notification dot, no new posts from anyone I follow, just a stale feed of stuff posted twelve hours ago. Kind of funny how fast that happened.
For the first 48 hours it genuinely felt like something. I built up 340-ish followers just by following whatever Instagram auto-suggested, posted a few dumb one-liners, got a handful of replies. It had that early-Twitter energy where everybody's still figuring out the format and nobody's mad yet. No ads, no algorithm fighting you, no quote-tweet pile-ons.
Then it just stopped. And I'm apparently not alone. The numbers going around this week (Similarweb's, mostly) show daily active users falling from about 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million by July 14th, cut in half in a week. Time spent in the app reportedly dropped even harder, from something like 21 minutes a day down to under 10. I don't need a chart to believe that one. My own feed already looks abandoned.
Part of it is obvious in hindsight. Threads shipped without a lot of the stuff people actually use to keep coming back: no search, no DMs, no web version at launch, no chronological feed option, nothing with hashtags. You couldn't even see who liked a post properly for the first while. It was a follow-graph borrowed wholesale from Instagram and not much else underneath it. Great for day-one hype, bad for day-fourteen retention, once the novelty wears off and you realize there's nothing to actually do in there besides post into a room that's slowly emptying out.
I'll say the unpopular thing though: I don't think this is a disaster for Meta. A hundred million signups from an app built in a few months is still a hundred million signups sitting in people's app drawers. Zuckerberg doesn't need daily numbers that beat Twitter's by August. He needs a plausible landing spot for whenever the next Twitter blowup happens, and given how this year's gone, that feels like a "when" more than an "if."
Meanwhile the same company had a genuinely bigger week on a totally different front. Meta put out Llama 2 yesterday, open for research and commercial use, with Microsoft hosting it on Azure. That's the story I'd actually bet gets talked about in five years, not the app with the barcode logo. It's funny watching one company run both plays at once, an attention-grabbing consumer app in one hand and a quietly important open model release in the other, and the app is the one everyone's actually looking at this week.
Unrelated complaint while I'm here: I still haven't closed my Twitter tab, and it's not loyalty, it's that Twitter (I refuse to call it X in my head yet, don't @ me) still has search that works, and I use it constantly to dig up old threads about, of all things, houseplant care. Threads has nothing like that. If I post something halfway clever in there today, it's functionally gone within about twenty minutes for anyone who wasn't online at that exact moment to catch it.
My account's still up. I check it maybe once a day out of habit, mostly to see if anyone I actually follow has posted anything. Usually the answer is no. I'd give it about even odds I've fully stopped opening it by Labor Day, unless they ship search or DMs before then, which honestly they might. Meta moves fast when they want to.
For now it's just sitting there on my home screen, notification badge dark, right next to an app I used to open every hour for a decade and apparently still can't quite quit.