The likes of GMail (or indeed Facebook) are, y'know, fine, and seem pretty successful that way. Frankly a good social network should annoy some portion of the Twitter crowd; there's something uniquely nasty about Twitter and replicating it wholesale is a mistake.
IMO, Gmail is allowed to be "fine" because it did a lot of things all in one go:
- provide a decent browser-based client
- lots of free storage!
- spam detection that beat out a lot of other providers at the time
It didn't hurt that it was being run by the what was the Big Tech's darling child at the time. Now, it's kind of hard to exist with out a Google account, and thus a GMail account. Google doesn't make a lot of money directly through GMail, but they make a decent amount of money through the enterprise license for Google Workspaces.
As for Facebook, the product is "fine" in the sense there are lots of users, but "Meta" the company is having doubts about whether the Social Graph is truly the priceless asset we all thought it was. More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192364
It might not be fair, but the expectation that users, Wall Street, and even Meta themselves place on Facebook is that it needs to do a lot better than "fine".
When GMail came out, it was well more than fine; it was a major advance. It had very strong word of mouth. These days it's fine, but that's because email is much less important. It still has a lot of usage for the reason I mentioned: because people still have to use email.
Facebook is similar. People were wildly enthusiastic about it. Some still love it, but for most it's in the "necessary" category. People keep using it not because of Facebook, but because their people are there. Very like LinkedIn in that sense.
If Threads is already only "fine" but isn't necessary, that sounds like the quick path to irrelevancy.
