New Thread, Who Dis?

Not even a week since launch and Mark Zuckerberg's Threads has given Elon Musk another reason to get into that cage match.

Meta launched the Twitter rival Threads around Wednesday last week, only to find that its social media platform was raking in users faster than Musk could say "Oh Sh*t." In fact, so fast have user signups been that Threads has now become the fastest-growing app in the world, dethroning ChatGPT which only made that record a few months ago.

According to Zuckerberg, Threads achieved 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, beating ChatGPT which took around two months to reach the same milestone.

More importantly, 100 million sign-ups is slightly less than half of the nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users that Twitter reported last year before Musk's take over. Given how quickly Threads has reached that number, experts are sounding the alarm for Twitter, though it's still too soon to be preparing an obituary.

Twitter has years and years of good will, given its impact as a cultural phenomenon, though that hasn't necessarily helped it from suffering at the hands of its eccentric billionaire owner Musk who keeps making decisions that have been detrimental to the platform's existence. Zuck on the other hand understands social media inside out, so is in a much better position to monetize his new platform once it reaches a stated goal of 1 billion users.

Users migrating to Threads are greeted by a UI that is eerily similar to that of Twitter's, which is perhaps why Musk is threatening to sue the platform for stealing trade secrets. Musk also called Zuckerberg a "cuck" during the weekend and proposed a "literal dick measuring contest" between the two billionaires to duke things out(hopefully not during the cage match).

Threads' supposed success is now the second time since last year that Musk has been made to be publicly embarrassed by the launch of a new product. The first was, of course, ChatGPT, the wildly successful chatbot created by OpenAI, of which Musk was a founder. Given his public fallout with the company, Musk will rarely, if ever, be able to bask in that company's success. And the second is, of course, Threads, which has put Twitter's entire existence into question.

For now, Musk can sleep easy knowing that he's still the richest man in the world.

Instagram, a prerequisite for signing up to Threads, dominated HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings this week by taking the #1 spot. Facebook was on the #2 spot while Twitter was trending at #4. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, was on the #7 spot.

In Other News.. 📰

• More than a quarter of jobs in the OECD rely on skills that could be easily automated in the coming artificial intelligence revolution, and workers fear they could lose their jobs to AI — via Reuters.
• US judge blocks Biden officials from contacting social media sites — via The Verge.
• Google quietly ditched plans for an AI-powered chatbot app for Gen Z — via CNBC.
• Google hit with lawsuit alleging it stole data from millions of users to train its AI tools — via CNN.
• Meta exec says ‘the metaverse hype is dead’ and he’s happy: ‘Now we can put our heads down to build’ — via Fortune.
• Microsoft cuts more jobs — via Axios.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon