Automatically creating a shadow account for everyone on Instagram?
Even allowing people to follow that account?
Sounds like they really wanted to push Threads out the door in a big way.
They’re not creating a shadow account, you’re literally logging in with your instagram account.
What this post is implying, is that the user numbers are just existing instagram accounts, which doesn’t make sense because in that case they’d have 2 billion users within the first second.
You can follow/request to follow before the user has actually “created” the account, so they’re lying about which users have done that already, not about how many users they actually have.
Come at me downvotes
ITT: no one who actually went through the sign-up process. It’s like a 3 step process. Eventually you get brought to a screen that asks if you want to follow all of your current followers on Instagram. You can choose yes or no to all the people you currently follow, or you can individually select who you want to follow in Threads the people you follow on Instagram. If you select anyone that has not yet activated their Threads account it literally tells you that nothing will happen for now, but if and when the user activates the account, you will follow them if they are public or it will request to follow them if they are private.
There’s no magic happening here. There’s no shadow accounts…you use the SAME login for Instagram and Threads. They obviously know when you activate your threads account and it will just show the list of users who have already completed the signup and requested to follow you
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Fuck Meta and all but this isn’t news. Meta litterally said straight up that they would be doing this before threads ever launched. If you have an instagram account then that is also your threads account. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s exactly what they told everyone they were doing. It’s no diferent than linked accounts for google services.
It’s a conspiracy just in the sense that they are seemingly counting these towards their growth numbers. If they’re saying they have 20 million accounts, but they created 3/4 of them as placeholders, then no…they have 5 million accounts.
Presumably they would have created ~2 Billion Threads accounts since there are ~2B Instagram users. Even if it was just the US there are approximately ~115M Instagram account.
So no, the 70M user number would just be the number to actually try Threads.
Google Play store alone has 10 mil+ downloads, so it’s easy to assume Apple has roughly the same…so that’s 20 million users right there…
Downloads aren’t equal to individual users, but you knew that because you’re disingenuous, not stupid, right?
I think the difference is that the Threads user count keeps getting thrown around as an indicator of its success and viability, but it’s not a great KPI.
I do think people are using this “realization” of accounts being automatically created as a conspiratorial gotcha, but it’s still important to remind people of this scenario as they evaluate their prospects.
If that were the case though, wouldn’t the number of Threads users be the exact same as the current number of Instagram users?
No because they’re only doing this for Instagram users who are located in the United States. It hasn’t launched anywhere else yet.
Probably because it will be quite illegal in Europe so they probably are not going to do it for European users but it hasn’t launched there yet anyway so we don’t know.
It’s available in the UK as well. They don’t follow EU privacy laws.
Why would this be illegal in Europe ?
Thank you for saying it.
I have only an Instagram account, checked just now with a friend who has instagram, Facebook, and now threads. He cannot find me on threads at all, so either this isn’t done to EVERYONE on Instagram, or these are just baseless rumors being spread around.
I assumed this was the case and that any reporting on “users” and the “historical” nature of their short time to 10M users was 100% BS.
I think the strategy is great and I would do the same that they are doing, except I’d leave out the bit where I crowed about reaching 10M users in 7 hour or 100M in a few days. It’s too obviously a lie supported by the ability to leverage one network into another.
Just deleted my Instagram account. I really want go delete Facebook and remove all things Meta from my life.
i did the reverse. deleted my facebook years ago but holding onto my instagram for now. i hardly use it anymore but it’s nice to keep in contact with old friends, but i’m on the fringe of deleting it
It’d be a luxury for me to delete insta but as a cartoonist that’d be just shooting myself in the foot. That said. I don’t have a FB anymore and only content post to both IG and Reddit these days. I do all my hangin’ here now :)
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I fucking KNEW it.
35 million users my asshole - they’re just counting existing Instagram accounts.
And now Meta knows when she’s having her period, the phone number of her gynecologist, and what period products she buys… thanks to the app spying on her health and fitness, contact, and shopping data.
#WTF
Thanks for the reminder to delete my Instagram account. Though I’ve never posted anything there, I’ve used it to follow some people.
Is it too much to hope that all of Meta crashes and burns? It’s infuriating seeing Meta, and corporations like them, harvest all of our information…
What I can’t figure is… who sits down and thinks “fuck Elon Musk and Twitter, I’m sick of this bullshit” and then follows that logic with “you know what I need more of in my life? Fuckin’ FACEBOOK, yeah.”
They might not be real supporters. They are probably shill accounts forum sliding and doing the same things to control consensus they have done everywhere else.
This is so true. I wish there was a will/way to eliminate bots altogether on a platform. The more popular a platform is, the more bots swarm in to sway the opinions of the crowd - political opinions, consumer opinions, you name it. Reddit was lousy with bots. Constant ceaseless opinion farming. What’s to stop Lemmy from becoming just as obnoxious?
I think novelty is an unfortunately large part of this. I day unfortunately because I think it’s very lame that we find creating accounts on servers providing the same service as another service we already an account on … interesting.
“We were promised flying cars and instead got 160 characters”. Well now we’ve got 160 characters … twice?!
Meaningless superficial cheap FOMO weaponised as advertising fodder. Shameful really.
Nice little webcomic that captures the sentiment: https://mastodon.social/@robcottingham/110679764036454402
Yes it does feel like swapping a ticket for the Titanic with a ticket for the Lusitania.
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For what I’ve heard they reserve existing Instagram usernames so no one can register with your Instagram username, so it’s not as bad at it might sound
Thats the positive side, but im 99% sure that isnt why they did it.
You mean to say… They are preemptively manipulating people?? Noooo!
I don’t see anybody posting there after the first day, save for brand and meme pages
Ah. The Google+ approach to signing up “users”.
Yeah all that mess with Google+ and all that came out of it was we lost the + operator in Google Search.
But you can’t close your threads account without closing your instagram account.
Added to my circle!
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