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It’s been a year since Meta released Threads in an attempt to compete with the platform now known as X. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted Threads to become “the public conversation app used by over a billion people.”
Meta’s timing was good: Threads launched during a particularly turbulent time for Twitter, leaving many people searching for alternatives. Threads gained 30 million subscribers on its first day, and the app has since grown to 100 million. According to Zuckerberg, the number of monthly users is According to Elon Musk, the app has 1 million monthly users.
But early versions of Threads still felt a bit broken. There was no web version. The company has promised interoperability with ActivityPub, the open-source standard that powers Mastodon and other apps in the Fediverse, but integration is still up in the air.
A year later, it’s still not clear what Threads is actually about. Its leaders “The goal is not to replace Twitter, but to create a ‘public square’ and ‘a place for less angry conversations’ for Instagram users,” it said. But the service itself still has a lot of problems that prevent it from realizing that vision. If Meta really wants to achieve that, here’s what it needs to change:
“For You” algorithm fixed
If you follow me on Threads, you already know this is my biggest pet peeve, but Meta needs to urgently fix the algorithm that powers Threads’ default “For You” feed. The algorithm feed, which is the default view on both the app and website, is painfully slow. It often shows posts from several days ago, even for big newsworthy moments when lots of people are posting about the same topic.
The situation is so bad that it’s become a meme to post something along the lines of, “I can’t wait to read about this in my ‘For You’ feed tomorrow” any time there’s a big news story or hot topic.
The algorithmic feed is also really weird: Threads, a platform built on Instagram, has incredibly finely tuned recommendations and over a decade of data on the topics I’m interested in, yet it doesn’t seem to use any of it. Instead, Threads oddly prioritizes strong, personal stories from accounts that I have no connection to.
Over the last year, I’ve seen countless multi-part thread posts from complete strangers detailing childhood abuse, eating disorders, chronic illnesses, domestic violence, the death of a pet, and other unimaginable horrors. These are not the posts I seek out, but Meta’s algorithm bumps them to the top of my feed.
I’ve been actively using thread swiping to filter out excess traumatic posts from my feed, and it’s helped to some extent, but it hasn’t increased the number of weird posts. Completely random Personal. The top two posts on my feed right now are from an event planner offering wedding tips, and a woman talking about a call she got from her health insurance company. (Both posts are 12 hours old.) These are the kind of posts that led blogger Max Reed to write the thread:Because it makes everyone feel as though they have some kind of mild brain injury.
Stop avoiding the news, politics, and anything “potentially sensitive”
Well, it’s understandable why Meta is being cautious about content moderation on Threads — the company doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to issues like extremism, health misinformation, and genocidal hate speech — so it’s no wonder they’d want to avoid similar headlines with Threads.
But if Meta wants threads to be a “public forum,” it can’t search for topics like COVID-19 or vaccines simply because they’re “potentially sensitive.” (Instagram head Adam Mosseri insisted the move was “temporary” last October.) If Meta wants threads to be a “public forum,” it shouldn’t remove political content from user recommendations, and thread leaders shouldn’t assume that users are interested in political content. To watch the news.
D.M., D.M., D.M.
A year later, it’s clear that a platform like Threads would be crippled without proper direct messaging functionality, and for some reason, Threads leaders, especially Mosseri, have been adamantly opposed to creating a separate inbox for the app.
Instead, users who want to connect with someone privately on Threads will have to switch to Instagram and hope that the person they’re trying to reach accepts their new message request. There’s also a way to post messages to your Instagram friends from Threads within the app, but only if you’re already connected on Instagram.
It’s unclear why Threads doesn’t have its own messaging feature. Mosseri suggests that it wouldn’t make sense to build a new inbox for the app, but this ignores the fact that many people use Instagram and Threads in very different ways. So consider the following:
Detach a thread from Instagram
Meta The fact that Threads was able to be released so quickly was largely down to Instagram, which built it using a lot of its code and infrastructure, which helped sign up tens of millions of people to the app.
But after a year, requiring an Instagram account to use Threads doesn’t make sense: For one, it would eliminate a significant number of users who are interested in Threads but don’t want to use Instagram.
There’s also the fact that, although these apps share some design elements, they’re very different types of services — and many people, myself included, use Instagram and Threads in very different ways.
“Public square” platforms like Threads are great for public-facing accounts where you can maximize the visibility of your conversations. But most people I know use their Instagram accounts for personal updates like family photos. While you can have different visibility settings for each app, you don’t have to link the two accounts. This also means that if you use Threads anonymously, you’ll need to create an entirely new Instagram account that serves as the login for your corresponding Threads account.
Mehta at least seems to be considering this. Mosseri and platform The company said it is “working on things like dedicated Thread accounts” and wants to make the apps “more independent.”
These aren’t the only factors that will determine whether Threads becomes Meta’s next billion-user app, as Zuckerberg speculated. Meta will eventually need to make money from the service, which is currently ad-free. But before Meta’s multi-billion-dollar ad machine is aimed at Threads, the company will need to more clearly explain who its latest app is actually aimed at.