We eventually identified a psychological trick:

1. Set the app’s Instagram profile to Private.

2. Set the bio to something mysterious, e.g., “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!”

3. Follow the targeted users.

4. Wait 24 hours to receive the inbound Follow Requests. (They were curious about our profile so they requested access)

5. At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch HouseTM), add the App Store URL to the profile.

6. Finally, make the profile Public

Supposedly this loophole/exploit(?) has been closed.

I've worked on some social platforms and participated in or watched many more and one thing I've noticed is that it is very hard to get users of a successful platform to play a different "game" than the one they are accustomed to.

It's also super hard to start something new so if you have 10,000-1,000,000,000 using voice chat or uploading and downloading scientific papers or anything else it would be a shortcut to use your platform to get those people to do something else but when you try it you find they are pretty resistant. Platforms like that have a huge amount of inertia and it's hard to get them to change.

For instance, everybody says Facebook is aging out and you don't see Facebook trying to counter that at all, instead their strategy has been to buy newer platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and make little effort to integrate them. When they do try to start something new like Threads they can't translate their existing large user base and technological advantage into a successful new product.

Bier has a heck of a track record at starting new things, and I'm sure Musk is paying Bier plenty, but I'm not sure anyone can steer that ship in a new direction.