Fraying Threads

Remember the good old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Meta’s spanking-new social media app Threads was going to destroy Twitter? My, how times change.

After rapidly gaining 100 million subscribers (out of approximately two billion Meta users), Threads has stalled and in fact regressed, with use of the app now barely one-fourth of what it was two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal reports:

For a second week in a row, the number of daily active users declined on Threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has also decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes. The average time spent for Android users in the U.S. dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company.

Twitter is doing just fine, the paper notes: “Twitter’s daily active users remain steady at about 200 million, and average time spent is at 30 minutes a day, according to Sensor Tower estimates.”

In a world where business has been thoroughly politicized, conflicts that once were interesting mainly to stockbrokers and their clients have become matters of public policy controversy. Now, one’s attitude toward a business is greatly based on its political positions.