Threads推出即大火，但它能走多远？

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Threads推出即大火，但它能走多远？

MIKE ISAAC2023年7月12日 Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by ShutterstockA big tech company with billions of users introduces a new social network. Leveraging the popularity and scale of its existing products, the company intends to make the new social platform a success. In doing so, it also plans to squash a leading competitor’s app.一家拥有数十亿用户的大型科技公司推出了新的社交网络。该公司打算利用现有产品的知名度和规模，使新的社交平台取得成功。它还计划在这一过程中压制竞争对手处于领先地位的应用程序。If this sounds like Instagram’s new Threads app and its push against its rival Twitter, think again. The year was 2011 and Google had just rolled out a social network called Google+, which was aimed as its “Facebook killer.” Google thrust the new site in front of many of its users who relied on its search and other products, expanding Google+ to more than 90 million users within the first year.这听起来像是在说Instagram推出新应用程序Threads以对抗竞争对手Twitter，但并非如此。那是2011年，谷歌刚刚推出了一款名为Google+的社交网络，希望它成为“Facebook杀手”。谷歌将新网站推向了许多依赖其搜索引擎和其他产品的用户面前，第一年将Google+的用户数量扩展至逾9000万。But by 2018, Google+ was relegated to the ash heap of history. Despite the internet search giant’s enormous audience, its social network failed to catch on as people continued flocking to Facebook — and later to Instagram and other social apps.但到了2018年，Google+就被扔进了历史的垃圾堆。尽管这家互联网搜索巨头拥有庞大的受众，但人们仍然继续涌向Facebook，后来又涌向Instagram和其他社交应用，谷歌的社交网络始终未能火起来。In the history of Silicon Valley, big tech companies have often become even bigger tech companies by using their scale as a built-in advantage. But as Google+ shows, bigness alone is no guarantee of winning the fickle and faddish social media market.在硅谷的历史上，大型科技公司经常利用自己的规模优势成为更大的企业。但正如Google+所表明的那样，仅靠规模并不能保证在变化无常、追逐潮流的社交媒体市场获胜。This is the challenge that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, now faces as he tries to dislodge Twitter and make Threads the prime app for real-time, public conversations. If tech history is any guide, size and scale are solid footholds — but ultimately can only go so far.这就是拥有Instagram和Facebook的Meta首席执行官扎克伯格眼下面临的挑战，他试图让Threads取代Twitter，成为实时公共对话的主要应用程序。如果以科技史为鉴的话，规模和大小的确是坚实的立足点——但这仅仅意味着一个好的开始。What comes next is much harder. Mr. Zuckerberg needs people to be able to find friends and influencers on Threads in the serendipitous and sometimes weird ways that Twitter managed to accomplish. He needs to make sure Threads isn’t filled with spam and grifters. He needs people to be patient about app updates that are in the works.接下来的事情要困难得多。扎克伯格希望人们能够在Threads上找到朋友和有影响力的人，就像Twitter以偶然、有时甚至是奇怪的方式设法做到的那样。他需要确保Threads不是一个充斥着垃圾邮件和诈骗者的地方。他需要人们对正在进行的应用程序更新保持耐心。In short, he needs users to find Threads compelling enough to keep coming back.简而言之，他需要用户发现Threads足够有吸引力，从而不断使用。扎克伯格试图让Threads成为实时公共对话的主要应用程序。为了赢得变化无常、追逐潮流的社交媒体市场，他现在面临挑战。“If you launch a gimmick app or something that isn’t fully featured quite yet, it might be counterproductive and you could see a lot of people churn right back out the door,” said Eric Seufert, an independent mobile analyst who closely watches Meta’s apps.密切关注Meta旗下各款应用的独立移动分析师埃里克·索伊弗特表示：“如果你推出一款噱头应用程序或功能尚不完善的应用程序，可能会适得其反，你可能会看到很多人很快就离开了。”For the moment, Threads appears to be an overnight success. Within hours of the app’s introduction last Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said 10 million people had signed up for Threads. By Monday, that had soared to 100 million people. It was the first app to do so in that time frame, exceeding the chatbot ChatGPT, which gained 100 million users within two months of its release, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.目前来看，Threads似乎一夜成名。扎克伯格表示，在上周三该应用推出后的几个小时内，已有1000万人注册。到周一，这一数字已飙升至1亿。据分析公司Similarweb称，它是第一个在该时间段做到这一点的应用程序，超过了聊天机器人ChatGPT，后者获得1亿用户是在发布后两个月内。Mr. Seufert, the mobile analyst, called the numbers that Threads had racked up “objectively impressive and unprecedented.”移动分析师索伊弗特称，Threads所取得的用户数量“客观地说令人印象深刻，且前所未有”。Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, has appeared agitated by Threads’ momentum. With 100 million people, Threads is quickly surging toward some of Twitter’s last public user numbers. Twitter disclosed it had 237.8 million daily users last July, four months before Mr. Musk bought the company and took it private.Twitter的所有者马斯克似乎对Threads的势头感到不安。Threads拥有1亿用户，正在迅速向Twitter最后一次公开的用户数量直奔而去。去年7月，即马斯克收购Twitter并将其私有化的四个月前，该公司披露每日用户数量为2.378亿。Mr. Musk has taken action. On the same day last week that Threads was officially unveiled, Twitter threatened to sue Meta over the new app. On Sunday, Mr. Musk called Mr. Zuckerberg a “cuck” on Twitter. Then he challenged Mr. Zuckerberg to a contest to measure a specific body part and compare whose was larger, alongside an emoji of a ruler. Mr. Zuckerberg has not responded.马斯克已采取行动。上周Threads正式发布的同一天，Twitter威胁要就这款新应用起诉Meta。周日，马斯克在Twitter上称扎克伯格为“软蛋”。然后，他要求扎克伯格量一量某个身体部位，比比谁的更大，还发了一个尺子的表情符号。扎克伯格目前未回应。(Before Threads was announced, Mr. Musk separately dared Mr. Zuckerberg to fight a “cage match.”)（在Threads发布之前，马斯克曾单独向扎克伯格挑衅，要他来一场“笼中格斗”。）What Mr. Musk lacks at Twitter, Mr. Zuckerberg has in abundance at Meta: enormous audiences. More than three billion users regularly visit Mr. Zuckerberg’s constellation of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.马斯克在Twitter缺乏的东西——庞大的受众，扎克伯格在Meta拥有很多。超过30亿用户定期访问扎克伯格的一系列应用，包括Facebook、Instagram、WhatsApp和Messenger。Mr. Zuckerberg has had plenty of experience nudging millions of people in those apps to use another of the apps. In 2014, for instance, he removed Facebook’s private messaging service from inside the social network’s app and forced people to download another app, called Messenger, to continue using the service.扎克伯格有丰富的经验，可以推动这些应用数以千万计的用户去使用另一款应用。例如，2014年，他从社交网络的应用程序中删除了Facebook的私人消息服务，并迫使人们下载一个名为Messenger的应用，才能继续使用该服务。Threads is now tied closely to Instagram. Users are required to have an Instagram account to sign up. People can import their entire following list from Instagram to Threads with just one tap of the screen, saving them from trying to find new people to follow on the service.Threads现在与Instagram紧密相连。用户必须拥有Instagram账户才能注册。用户只需轻触屏幕，就可以将整个关注列表从Instagram导入到Threads，省去了在该服务上寻找新关注者的麻烦。On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg suggested there was more he could do to push Threads’ growth. He had not “turned on many promotions yet” for the app, he wrote in a Threads post.周一，扎克伯格表示，他还可以做更多的事情来推动Threads的增长。他在Threads的一篇帖子中写道，他还没有为这款应用“开启很多推广活动”。Some users have wondered why Threads seems to have made its debut without some basic functions that are used inside Instagram, like a search function that allows people to browse trending hashtags.一些用户想知道，为什么Threads在首次亮相时似乎少了Instagram的一些程序内基本功能，比如允许人们浏览热门话题标签的搜索功能。“There are a lot of features Threads did not launch with, possibly by design, to keep it brand safe” and minimize controversy from the start, said Anil Dash, a tech industry veteran and writer. “What does that do to the long-term interesting-ness of the network?”科技行业资深人士、作家阿尼尔·达什说，“Threads没有推出很多功能，可能是为了保证品牌安全”，从一开始就尽量减少争议。“这对网络的长期趣味性会产生什么影响？”Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in a Threads post on Monday that there was a running list of new features to add to the new app that people have requested. “They say, ‘make it work, make it great, make it grow,’” he wrote, adding, “I promise we will make this thing great.”Instagram负责人亚当·莫塞里周一在Threads发表的帖子中说，人们要求在这款新应用中添加一系列新功能。他写道，“他们说，‘让它成功，让它精彩，让它成长’，”还说，“我保证我们会把它做得很棒。”Yet bolting on a new app to a company’s existing products can eventually run out of steam.然而，将一款新应用与公司现有产品捆绑在一起，最终可能导致虎头蛇尾的结果。In 2011, after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and its chief executive at the time, cloned Facebook with Google+, users soon grew bored of the novelty of the new social network and stopped using it. Some saw Google+ as something that was forced on them while they were just trying to gain access to their Gmail.2011年，谷歌联合创始人兼时任首席执行官拉里·佩奇退出模仿Facebook的Google+之后，用户对这个新社交网络的新鲜劲很快就过了，不再使用它。有些人认为，Google+是在访问Gmail时强加给他们的东西。微软创始人比尔·盖茨利用Windows操作系统的规模来捆绑其他软件并压垮竞争对手。Former Google employees described the product as “fear-based,” built only in response to Facebook and without a clear vision of why people should be using it instead of a competing network. In a post-mortem of what went wrong, one ex-Googler wrote that Google+ mainly defined itself by “what it wasn’t — i.e. Facebook.”前谷歌员工将这款产品描述为“基于恐惧”的产品，只是为了回应Facebook而开发的，并没有明确说明人们为什么应该使用它而不是其他竞品网络。一名前谷歌员工在事后分析问题原因时写道，Google+主要是通过“它不是什么，即它不是Facebook”来定义自己的。Of course Mr. Zuckerberg could pull a Bill Gates with Threads. Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft, built his empire on Windows, the operating system that powered a generation of personal computers — and then successfully used that scale to crush competitors.当然，扎克伯格也可以在Threads上效仿比尔·盖茨。盖茨是微软的创始人之一，他用Windows操作系统建立了自己的帝国，这个操作系统推动了一代个人电脑的发展，然后成功地利用这一规模碾压竞争对手。Once Windows dominated PCs, Mr. Gates famously bundled other products with the software for free. When he did that in 1995 by packaging the web browser Internet Explorer with Windows, Internet Explorer soon turned into the default browser on millions of computers, overtaking the then-dominant browser, Netscape, in just four years.当Windows在个人电脑市场占据主导地位时，盖茨广为人知的做法是将其他产品免费捆绑在该系统上。1995年，他将网络浏览器Internet Explorer打包到Windows中，IE很快就成为数千万台电脑的默认浏览器，仅用了四年时间就超越了当时占主导地位的Netscape浏览器。Even so, Mr. Gates was eventually stung by the tactic. In 1998, the Justice Department sued Microsoft for unfairly using Windows’ market power to snuff out the competition. In 2000, a federal judge ruled against Mr. Gates’s company, saying Microsoft had put an “oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune.”即便如此，这种策略最终还是令盖茨受害。1998年，美国司法部起诉微软不公平地利用Windows的市场力量扼杀竞争。2000年，一名联邦法官裁定盖茨的公司败诉，称微软“在竞争财富的天平上按下了手指头”。Microsoft later settled with the government and agreed to make concessions.微软后来与政府达成和解，同意做出让步。Mike Isaac是一名科技记者，也是《Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber》的作者，这是一本讲述叫车公司优步戏剧性兴衰的畅销书。他经常报道Facebook和硅谷，常驻旧金山。欢迎在Twitter和Facebook上关注他。翻译：明斋、晋其角点击查看本文英文版。  https://feedx.best

Source: Threads推出即大火，但它能走多远？