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.
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.
Why does everything have to be a conspiracy with some people? Threads literally and directly explains that it uses your Instagram account. They're the same account. Nothing crazy. No magic. No oogie boogie. Just the same account.
It's not creating a "shadow account", it is literally the same account. Threads is just a different frontend for what already existed with Instagram. And Meta would've been stupid, if they wouldn't have use what they already have.
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
Actually, to Meta's credit here, they do transparently say this when you make an account.
You can send follow requests to all of your Insta friends, and once they activate a Threads profile, they will see any follow requests they may have gotten.
I think something that a lot of the comments are missing here is the fact that threads, Instagram and Facebook all have been migrated from individual accounts to ‘meta’ accounts. I’m certain that we will see this happen with many platforms unless there is a serious shift in data protection laws. I don’t personally think it’s great that it’s the case but that’s just how it is. The meta platform is quite similar to how google migrated YouTube users to google accounts way back in the day. This monolithic structure ensures that they can keep your user data in a more streamlined database. From a sys admin and a business perspective it makes a lot of sense. From a user who doesn’t care and already uses all of those services perspective it makes a lot of sense. From a privacy conscious user perspective it makes no sense. Then again metas platform is in no way for the user who cares how their data is being handled.
I guess another perspective is talking about interoperability. It kind of feels like they are taking the web3 (I know it’s a loaded term) approach but instead of applying it in a way that allows free development and communication in a way that basically pulls from decentralized/distributed databases you instead get a centralized monolithic model that creates interoperability within their own walled garden.
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.
What I find curious is that Meta is super willing to use Instagram to boost their new services, but not WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is installed in more than 92% of all active smartphones where I live. You need it - that's how customer support, lawyers, your friends, family and even workplace will communicate with you. I heard India and some European countries also have a lot of WhatsApp users. Yet Meta doesn't abuse your WhatsApp account to create a Threads profile, for instance. Curious. I wonder how long that's going to last.
Though if you install WhatsApp on Android, it does also silently install two Meta packages that technically claim to auto-update it and handle authentication... Except WhatsApp only updates via the Google Play Store, and authentication works without them, so I wonder what they're truly doing running in the background.
If anyone was bothering to listen, we've discovered that big tech uses a lot of fraud to make themselves look bigger than they are, especially early on
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
In fairness, it's pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.
Is this not basically what google and Microsoft do with their stuff, minus the subscribe even though they aren't there yet bit? It's your meta account, regardless if you're using that particular feature?
So it's made of mostly fake accounts from Instagram. That has to be the shadiest thing I've seen from a social media app. Just making "shadow" accounts from other social media apps to artificially boost it's analytics.
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.
They did this with Facebook accounts to instagram too. My brother has never downloaded instagram yet he's my top follow suggestion all the time and it just uses his Facebook profile picture automatically
Well, it's basically an extension to your insta account. So I imagine when you sign up, it sends requests to others you know to make it seem like everybody uses it.
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.
Of course that's why they had so many new accounts so fast! And that's why removing the Threads account also deletes your Instagram one! No way a bad app like that, missing the basic features (front what I've read in reviews), would have so many users so fast!
I smell an antitrust lawsuit coming up. Whether we hate Twitter or not, they could have a valid case against Meta here as this shit is anti-competitive as fuck. If Elon is smart enough, and that's a big if, he could seize the opportunity to sue Meta over this and win. To just be able to recycle existing Instagram users gives Meta an unfair advantage over existing microblogging social media platforms.