I'm kind of amazed at how saturated the news is with stories about Threads. And not just tech news, but also every mainstream news site has at least one or more "submarine" marketing articles promoting Threads. Meta Marketing Team: You're not fooling anyone into thinking these are grassroots and viral, but honestly, well done with the media saturation. Meta's clearly got all the right channels on full-blast. It's really impressive.
HN is downright quiet on the topic, with only 21 posts over 20 comments since the launch (2023-07-05), 4 posts per day. Compare that to the Reddit blackout posts which seem to be closer to 8 posts per day. Only 8 posts with over 100 comments, whereas it's hard to find even a single Reddit blackout post at less than 100 comments. My friends in every other community are buzzing about Threads, but here on HN someone comes into every thread to remind me that Mastodon doesn't need growth to be a success, whether the thread was about Mastodon or not.
Just gives me more of that feeling that the community here is becoming more detached. Maybe it's just me, but I'm watching The Great Fragmentation with open eyes to see what comes next.
Maybe it's because HN is more like Reddit than Twitter/Threads, so there's more reasons to care about it. And a lot of Redditors probably came to talk about it here, some because their favorite subreddit was on strike.
Also the Reddit situation was very dramatic and adversarial, Threads is just a new boring product with a clean launch.
I think it's more that the HN crowd cannot stand to think, much less utter the phrase "you've gotta hand it to Mark Zuckerberg and crew." That's at least the feeling I have to get over when I praise Threads.
I think it's important to remember that virality can be fickle and Threads may go the way of Clubhouse. We really don't know where it'll land up. Among Us was the hit game of the pandemic and now it's not.
But maybe the crowd here should be a bit more humble and restrained by their biases, it's a useful art to practice. When I first saw YouTube in late 2005 I told all my friends that it would go nowhere because Flash was a resource intensive, proprietary technology. Now I pay for YouTube Premium.
Why would you say that? No one should be surprised or really even impressed that Meta could make Threads even as fast as they did. They've already made this kind of app several times.
That wouldn't be an interesting take or conversation and is sort of against the HN vibe.
Not to say that doesn't happen all the time, but agree with GP; they did a thing meh. Will seen if it gets traction over Twitter and then that will be interesting.
Honestly there's no need for a Twitter with porn. It's not like there's any lack of options for publishing or viewing porn on the internet.
Of course if Twitter wants to host porn more power to 'em, it's just not a make or break differentiator. I have a feeling in a year or two people will assume that if you're still on Twitter, it's for the porn, with the plausible deniability of "no man, it's for the free speech!"
I've been toying with all the various Twitter alternatives as they have had their 5 minutes of fame and Threads definitely feels different and like it might stick.
That feels like very big news but not to HN I guess?
I think over time HN has become more like a lot of other tech communities; a bit ideological, zealous, and detached. Most of these groups have ingroups (the virtuous hackers) and outgroups (CIA, NSA, RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Big Tech, Social Media, techbros, billionaires, <zeitgeist enemy>.) This is the kind of community you'll find in a lot of FSF mailing lists, Libera (formerly Freenode) channels, and Linux subreddits. Threads, being a Meta project, is an outgroup project, so not worth talking about no matter how many use it. The other Twitter alternatives align more with the ingroup so worth boosting beyond their actual usage. It depends on what you want out of a community, some people want a space that is a bit relaxed and others want something a bit more cliquish. The FSF orbit communities have always been on the cliquish side.
For me if I wanted something more zealous I'd spend more time on Libera channels or FSF MLs. The few I do spend time in satisfy my fill of that culture.
My less cynical viewpoint is that it just isn't that interesting.
It's a bare-bones Twitter clone made by Meta. There's no interesting new technology to discuss, no open source angle, no discussion on the company founder that hasn't been done 100 times.
HN has plenty of discussions about interesting Meta projects - Quest, React, the metaverse, financial discussions, etc. I just don't think there's much to grip people on this topic.
Nobody has covered the interesting angle -- this is the first time I've seen social media companies launch direct competitors, rather than a novel way to capture attention.
Yeah, and even TikTok itself has done this. There was this flash in the pan social media app that was popular for like 2-3 months at some point in the past year (I forget when) called BeReal and TikTok added an exact clone of the functionality.
They've been stealing features from the competition for years. Snapchat was really novel when it came out, then the others created effectively the same UX. Clubhouse was a novel take as well, then Twitter added a clone of it right into the main app.
I can't actually think of the last time one of the existing networks launched a new app to compete rather than just stealing UX features, that is a new one to me for sure!
Hasn't Threads been around for awhile? I thought I ran across it when browsing Facebook's store page on one of the app stores and saw it a long time ago.
Regardless I do think its funny that Facebook had photos but Instagram is still a product and now Facebook has always had status updates and now Threads is a product. Facebook is almost just a mashup of Instagram + Threads. Or in a way some demographic of users liked a Facebook experience but for photos only (Instagram) and another set of users liked a Facebook experience but for status updates only (Threads).
I can offer some simpler alternative explanations, though it's possible that it could be a combination of these things.
* This is anecdotal, but I quit using Twitter in 2016, so the "downfall" of it doesn't impact me much and I am not looking for a replacement. News about all of this is mildly interesting, but I have no personal investment in the outcome really.
* One of the things that Twitter did in the past couple weeks that they took a lot of heat for was that they gated viewing tweets to having an account. But Instagram and Facebook have been gated like this for a while now.
You can view thumbnails of the 9 latest posts, but trying to click into the detail view on them gives you a login gate. Trying to do pretty much anything opens a login modal.
So why are we zealous and ideological for not being excited that the product that seems likely to replace it is coming from a company that does the same exact things that people are upset about?
As the poster above said, the hype may not be organic, so I wouldn’t expect communities to be talking about threads. The media might be all the source of the hype.
Threads was on the front page for an entire day or two. A sizable percentage of the entire lifetime of the App.
Twitter and Musks other ill-adventures will continue to dominate HN though. Zuckerberg is not part of the HN in-crowd and will draw about as much water as his other services.
It’s been downloaded close to 100 million times at this point and has blown past every growth record to date. I think it’s completely logical for every mainstream news site to mention it.
I honestly can’t imagine a source like the New York Times not having an article. Twitter’s threatened lawsuit alone merited coverage.
It’s not surprising because they are promoting it with, for example, pop ups in Instagram about claiming your username. They already have a wide reach to promote the product.
I don't know, i think this could be authentic. People have been mad at elon for a while now and there is a blood in the water - i think mainstream is interested in this drama and the new contender.
I think tech news is relatively quiet on this front because quite frankly, twitter is not that interesting as a product technically speaking. This is a political story not a technical one, and it ties into so many beats that are popular with the masses (e.g. the ultra rich being stupid and getting their comeuppance, increased influence of the far right with twitter being seen as a breeding ground, musk specifically being hated by a large segment of the population, etc).
Are people outside of the tech industry and Politics really concerned at all with Elon or Twitter?
My anecdotal experience is that the only people I interact with where this comes up are either people who seen to be parroting a story from 24 hour news or a techy that abandoned Twitter shortly after the purchase (many of have since whom quietly returned).
> Are people outside of the tech industry and Politics really concerned at all with Elon or Twitter?
Are people who dont care about politics the target audience of the mainstream "news"? I'm sure lots of people dont care about twitter drama but i think the people who read the publications talking about twitter drama are firmly in the camp of people who care, which is why said publications are talking about it.
> Are people who dont care about politics the target audience of the mainstream "news"?
Wel again I can only speak to the interactions I have with people I know, but much of my family spends an inordinate amount of time watching 24 hour news and telling me about he latest headline of the day. They don't seem to care about politics at all though, as soon as I ask questions attempting to dig deeper into the issue or political views that might lead to that stance the conversation grinds to a halt. My best read on most people that fall into the target audience of network news is that they are people more easily influenced and drawn into drama that pits one group against another.
My original question regarding Twitter really was meant as a genuine question though. The only people I have had even mention Elon Must and Twitter seem to be in the tech world, I'm curious if I'm in a bit of a bubble myself and the Elon/Twitter issues do in fact reach beyond that.
My entire friend circle is outside of tech and hate politics, and are tired of Twitter imploding.
They all want something new, or at least Twitter before Elon.
Most recently, we were trying to find news about the Paris riots, and there’s nothing but misinformation (videos from other riots) spammed consistently, that have no community notes, and have nothing but racist twitter blue users pushed to the top of the replies.
It’s creating a huge fog of war when just trying to figure out what’s going on.
It’s like all the moderation systems have just gone offline.
Honest question, as someone who doesn't use Twitter: why don't you just read the papers?
For the specific case of the Paris riots, you could check on Le Figaro (right-leaning) and Le Monde (left-leaning) – yest, both of them.
I find that following two newspapers allows me to get a balanced-enough take on current events. No need to try to decipher some ultra-short quip from random people and infer the 90% of missing context on my own.
I can see the sweet spot for community-driven/social journalism:
- Get updates between the new cycles. If you can get the scores for the football match in tomorrow’s paper, why even need to see the game?
- Get more targeted information, i.e. my favorite pastry shop is where some stuff went down, was it impacted? Someone might have commented on that/taken photos nearby.
- Get an even more unbiased opinion. Both the right and left leaning papers might have the same sponsor they happen to not make disparaging remarks about, or the local government might be able to quash things.
Then again wherever you have eyeballs looking you’ll have people trying to push an agenda in the raw feed, whether it’s political, economic or clout chasing.
> Most recently, we were trying to find news about the Paris riots
I've been very frustrated by this for a few years now. At least since the start of the pandemic response, I've noticed myself having a very hard time finding news on topics the BLM protests/riots, trucker rallies, Paris protests/riots, etc that didn't feel extremely controlled or moderated. Finding what seems to be unbiased updates on the war has also been particularly difficult, though that's kind of expected given that it's effectively an active hot war between Russia and Nato at this point.
Agreed. I think people underestimate the extent to which major and influencers have left Twitter entirely due to sociocultural and political events. Never mind the fact that Twitter has 700m users v the many billions more that Meta has.
There’s a strong likelihood Threads exists as a Twitter alternative but not necessarily a direct competitor, simply because of demographics.
Honestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.
The real market is for brands, they can't stand the insanity on Twitter.
I think of Musk's idea of turning Twitter into a super app. Well, if I go into a business and somebody asks me to pay with Twitter that business is going to be associated with Musk, Twitter, and all that. If the business is selling anti-woke razor blades it might be a good fit, but an ordinary business just doesn't want to be associated with that. Contrast that to Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, all of which have worked hard to be associated with a positive image.
I can just imagine it, “spend $500/month with Twitter Pay and you get a green checkmark, promoting your tweets even above the already promoted blue checkmark tweeters”
Meta isn’t that stupid. Messing with the verification system is one of the blunders that put Twitter in the position where Threads could eat its lunch.
The problem with blue checkmark wasn’t that it was paid for verification. The problem was that there was no verification. You paid to be verified as anybody you’d like.
I’m no twitter owner, but to me the reasonable thing would be to put the name on the credit card on the account along with the checkmark.
That would scale for personal accounts, but not businesses. They could be charged extra and manually verified against national business registries.
The comparables on my mind are the EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates and the Legal Entity Identifier, both of which involve a lookup against business records for a corporation/LLC and have a sustainable cost of around $100 year.
EV failed in the marketplace. “No LEI, No Trade” made a lot of companies get an LEI but last time I looked it was widespread for companies to keep using their LEI without renewing it.
Instagram offered the same system (pay for blue check) shortly after twitter. But yes, they didn't revoke anyone's existing tick or make it a prerequisite for future "notable" people.
The problem is, it’s made by Meta. I remember when Facebook was a place you went to get in touch with friends. That was a long time ago now - at some point they stopped showing the feed in chronological order and I thought it was the worst change. They just kept making it worse. Now, if I go look, most of my feed is just random “viral” content and ads.
Meta takes a thing you find useful and gradually tweaks it until it no longer does what you originally wanted it for. I don’t trust them to run a service .
This is correct but it's helpful to specify how much more toxic twitter has become than other platforms.
For example anti-LGBT sentiments are common on other platforms just like they are common in society. But on twitter people like Jake Shields literally call for the murder of therapists, doctors, and teachers who are supportive of LGBT teens. How did twitter respond? First they let the tweets get thousands of engagements. Then they removed the tweets without banning Shields. Finally they removed other people's tweets, archive links, and screenshots documenting Shields' hate speech. Jake Shields is still on twitter pushing toxic lies and disinfo.
TL;DR: Elon Musk's twitter protects people who want to murder doctors and teachers.
I think it was a very deliberate ploy by Musk to shift the political Overton window to way to the right.
Unfortunately for him & his backers, the political shenanigans and general incompetence left Twitter vulnerable, with users seemingly choosing to trust Meta over it, of all fucking companies. This will be case study in business school for years.
Threads is polished in a way that Mastodon isn't. I'm part of a few Japanese subcultures and most of them couldn't make heads or tails of the Fediverse despite the existence of Misskey. Threads though? They signed up through Instagram and were posting in minutes. I really want Meta to commit to federation, even if existing Mastodon communities defederate so that techie weirdos like us can live their dreams of running custom clients and interfacing with regular folks (like XMPP federation with GChat back in the day.)
Yeah, Twitter is super big in Japan for mainstream teen and young adult users in the 18-25 city student/young professional demographic. Same with Instagram. Mastodon adjacent stuff like Misskey, Pawoo, and Mstdn got the reputation for being for hosting weird, niche, or pretty much illegal content, and nobody really understands the point of Fediverse.
Also, mastodon just isn't easy like twitter/reddit/insta is. There's hurdles you have to get past. It's to the degree that, despite being the target demo for masto, I still haven't really gotten into it. Too many hoops. Even a flippin' bbs seems to make more sense at this point
A friend of mine tried mastodon on my recommendation. But he couldn't find a "login with facebook" button, which is how he assesses whether a website is trustworthy. Mastodon to him is "like a scam version of threads". You'd be surprised how prevalent this view is with normal non-hn crowd.
A good chunk of them did, and some of them stuck around. I've had an account going back to 2017, and my feed is far more active today than it was before Elon purchased the site.
Honestly its amazing that as many people went with mastodon as they did.
Ideologically motivated (i.e. "federated-first") open source projects never succeed in attracting mainstream users. They have to make too many compromises, and inevitably prioritize their motivation (federation) over what is necessary to attract the mainstream (e.g. excellent UX).
The fact that mastadon is doing as well as it is, is sign number 1 that the market is begging for something like threads to happen.
On Twitter and other centralized social media this is very easy to do. On Mastodon, it is not. I have to copy the URL, paste it into a text field on my instance, and then like it.
Threads has accumulated a huge number of users in a very short amount of time, and it's related to the instability, near-implosion we've seen at Twitter from Musk's leadership. Of course that's big news.
It's just not really big news here, because people here REALLY hate Meta (and probably dislike the Twitter-style model of social media anyway).
I don’t know with Twitter going through various meltdowns having met a step up and say hey, you can come here instead I feel like it’s pretty big news. This product also wasn’t at least on my radar at all and so I think it was sort of a big surprise for everybody. The eighth largest website on the planet size to go toe to toe with Twitter… Seems like big news?
I am just wondering what this app is (do not have an Instagram account so can’t try it; I had deleted mine, so not creating one). How the fuck everyone is talking about an app on HN that’s is Facebook one of the richest tech companies with one of the biggest tech pool out there which is just essentially a copy of Twitter.
It’s like kids got a new toy. Any toy. So they gotta play with it.
I can't necessarily disagree, but even if Meta wasn't marketing, Twitter suing less than 24 hours after launch meant it was going to be front page news for at least a couple days.
Did you slow clap at your last statement because you figured it all out?
Because of Elon Musk Twitter has been in the news for months. That includes his impulsive decision to buy it, firing massive amounts of people, and to keep everyone focused on him a barrage of right wing themed tweets about hot button political topics. Of course the news media is reporting on this.
Then a massive US tech company, whose founder has a hollywood blockbuster biopic, releases a clone of Twitter. That's also news.
THEN Elon Musk sues them right after the launch publically claiming former Twitter employees stole code. You know, Elon Musk, the person I mentioned who did all those things he what did.
Then you make this "oh typical US media, the Zucks has them under his liberal soft thumb" comment because no way the news would normally report on all these major public and outrageous figures along their big business infighting
You forgot the literal billionaire cage match that Musk tried to initiate but then backed out of when it seemed like Zuck wasn't afraid to fight him. Seemed like everyone was talking about it for a couple of days…
Elon didn't back out of the fight his Mom told him to cut it out. Really. I'm no Elon fan but it's pretty funny and good that his Mom has some common-sense.
In a way they are in a cage match only it's Threads vs Twitter.
Because he's Elon Musk I can't tell if his mom actually stopped the fight or you were making a pun about immaturity by implying his mother still controls his life like a kid.
yea it was pretty obvious they were spamming on the day, when you could see numerous reddit posts announcing that "threads is launching" with pretty much the exact same title in multiple subreddit, all from different accounts.
> Threads has one of the largest plugins we’ve ever seen. BarcelonaShareExtension is 81 MB. For context, the largest Instagram plugin - InstagramNotificationExtension is 23.5 MB. TheInstagramShareExtension is 5.6 MB
Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and the binary size shrink will look good on someone's performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real impact on usage.
Let's be honest, nobody cares how big it is, so long as it doesn't force you to download over WiFi. Nobody sorts the App Store by 'size.' It's more important in the initial release to prove product market fit rather than spending time whittling down the share extension.
They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a good plan.
Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with.
Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts.
A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.
The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is probably 15-20 people proving a concept.
The dissonance you’re pointing out is Twitter is being mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when it certainly didn’t need to. It’s the stick in the spokes meme in corporate form.
Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a company that very much isn’t - and notably one that hasn’t shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 products.
Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter.
[edit] I can't help but feel like the Twitter changes are just like the Digg re-design that led to its relegation to archive.org, and if this had never happened, I seriously doubt anyone would have challenged Twitter, let alone Zucc.
I don't think it's biased to be a lot less impressed by "things" like dragging your engineers in over the weekend over the threat of termination if they can't make your own tweets more popular.
>His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
>Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
That's not impressive, it's reprehensibly poor management of people both as human beings and as company resources. There's no way I can figure how to view this story as a laudable effort to ship fast and iterate the platform quickly.
Isn't it far more biased to assume that anything Musk ships is good?
Features and shipping should be evaluated empirically by results, not by deciding a priori that the decision maker is good or bad.
So I think you might be projecting a bit with your bias. And for that matter, I didn't even mention Musk's changes at all, yet you seem to be grouping me in with people that have! (But for the record, I preferred the feature set of Twitter before Musk started changing things. Still, the feature changes are still a loooot less important than the user base. And by prioritizing replies by paying versus non-paying customers, the user base that I experience on Twitter has gone down in quality by a ton, meaning that it is far less useful. That and shutting down the site for a few days and letting me experience zero of the user base-or rather a feed refresh two reply threads before 600 tweets were hit-was completely boneheaded. Stupid. B-player move.
> They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows
Indeed, they have. How the heck do you find anything? On the web thingie I could find no search bar, to say nothing of the hashtags that have not been implemented (?!). And, somehow, there are people here taking their side on this. Like, what the heck, how can you launch a social media app in this day and age with almost no discoverability?
Your comments vis a vis app size are not correct. App size (and battery consumption) have a strong, linear inverse correlation with initial downloads and engagement. There are a number of reasons users may not like large app sizes including being on a strictly data capped phone plan or having bad reception. Even reduction of megabytes showed big changes to engagement (often bigger than feature changes). Reducing app size was and I imagine continues to be a high level strategic priority at Facebook.
I agree with your overall conclusion however. Going to market with something is more important than optimizing for size.
have a trademark filing for "Threads" as a name for a communications service. If I picked out the right two screenshots you might have a hard time telling them apart
Stack choice is extremely important. Your best possible performance/binary size/resource usage is a function of your stack. You make that choice in minutes when starting a new project, but then it haunts you for years. If you built your desktop app with Electron for example, you can't just ditch it at once down the road — switching to something better would be a serious, laborious, long undertaking. It might be easier to just chuck the thing altogether and start from scratch.
Facebook isnt going to be nice about this. They know they are in a strong position here.
Expect an addicting algorithm that is fueled by ragebait (and if its anything like IG, coombait). The fact that it didn't release with an ability to time-sort tells you everything you need to know. Everyone knows how easy it is to sort by time, especially when stakes are low. Its anti-consumer from day 1.
The surge in people are likely influencers and people marketing their companies trying to get ahead of the algorithm. We've all learned the first ones to join a social media network are winners.
The people with novel ideas need to be convinced, and I'm not sure these people are ready to come back to facebook.
I don't think it's that sinister. Time based sorting is a bad day 1 feature since nobody has much of a follow graph yet. Forcing the algorithm is a good way to make sure your feed feels "full" even if you're starting from zero. I don't like the algorithm either, it's full of brands and spammy meme pages that lifted their content over from IG. But in terms of cold-starting a social graph, I get it. Plus they already said they're going to add a chrono feed soon.
I second the previous user, any lack of time-based sorting means I'm gonna waste a lot of time (which is what Meta wants). Been there with other socials, done that, not interested.
You can tell they're having a lot of launch day backend pains. Push notifications are sometimes up to a day delayed. Follows don't stay followed, auto-follow on join doesn't seem to work at all. QTs don't show up properly half the time. Refreshing the feed takes forever, and you can tell when it fails to load your personalized feed, it just falls back on a generic feed with a bunch of random people. Even loading a profile page takes a noticeably long amount of time.
A strong position? They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks and their odds are... OK at best. They have every incentive to make their new service as desirable and accessible as possible (until such time they are too big for people to leave and then they can do whatever they want).
> Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks.
By active users, yes Twitter is smaller than many of the other big networks. But by influence, Twitter is one of, if not the biggest fish in the pond. @[username] is everywhere in advertising and news programs. People don't break news on Facebook and Instagram. There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion for Twitter, and it wasn't the revenue per user. It was buying influence.
The last year has significantly weakened Twitter's position. Musk paid $44B for a company that was almost immediately worth less; he has massively harmed it's image for further valuation reduction. The recent "must be logged in to view tweets" and "only X00 items available" combined with the increase in hate speech weakened it even further.
Further, Twitter has laid off 75% of the people who could help combat this push.
You are describing Twitter from 2-3 years ago. It is not is such a strong position now, and people are actively looking for something else that provides similar functionality. By bootstrapping from an existing social graph, it's a really strong possibility this is Twitter's death blow.
The reason Musk wanted to buy Twitter was to satisfy bis own enormous ego and whims. He did try to get out of buying it though.
As for relevance... A few more great business decisions from Musk, and Twitter's relevance will plummet to unrecoverable depths. All Facebook has to do with Threads is not do obvious mistakes.
But that all is completely beside the point. The original claim was "They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks".
"Large networks" are counted in terms of MAU and hours of engagement. And Twitter is rapidly losing it's relevance. Because FB's (and everyone's) largest competitors are
1. Time. There's only 24 hours in the day
2. Social networks and products grabbing that time: TikTok and video streaming services
Why would they need people with novel ideas? Most users are happy to consume reposts and influencer spam ad infinitum, and they're probably the most monetizable segment.
I dunno, I think the real market for "Threads" is brands and brands want some place that is innocuous. It seems the worst threat to Twitter is that advertisers are pulling out.
If Meta manages to beat Twitter at "amplifying angry voices" it's not going to be an attractive place to buy ads. Look at how YouTube blocks anything that is even slightly erotic (unless you could those "young girl shaking their ass" videos that are all Shorts wants to show me, and I'm not sure if those have ads) or that show any action in the Ukraine war, etc.
If you leave Facebook for long enough and are a man, it'll start sending you notifications anytime a woman you follow posts something. (I don't know what it sends women.)
That said, Instagram is actually not run like Facebook in my experience, which is most of the reason Threads is part of IG.
I think that happens because females tend to use social media more, or out of your social graph females are the ones who do. Im a straight partnered male and i dont get coombait because i dont find the content interesting and very quickly i get cute pets and science stuff and half of the suggested people are other male friends
I'm not sure how many different "algorithms" Instagram has. For me I've got the reels to only show me animal videos so it's a pretty good experience, but I'm afraid to give them any signals that'll knock it to anything else. Account recommendations and ads do try to hornybait me, mostly because my partner is a dancer so it reads that content as sexy.
This is the first time I actually look at anything that is on the Instagram Threads.
Seems a lot like the comments under an Instagram post, without the picture / video on top.
Also the logo on the top of the page just toggles dark mode / light mode, instead of bringing me to any kind of home page where I can explore more discussions.
https://www.instagram.com/ is a thing, so I imagine it's just a matter of time. I can't disagree with their choice of releasing for mobile first in 2023 though.
They seem to have started to redirect to web login page which doesn't exist yet so it redirects to homepage when you "power use".
I noticed it's becoming unbrowsable on my VPN where other IP users probably use up all of the "free view" tokens for the shared IP address. I guess that's one way for Meta to have their cake and eat it too.
There are read-only web links for users and posts. The easiest way to see it is by copying a link to a user or post from within the app. But there doesn't seem to be a web landing/browse/feed page yet (besides the main page that just gives a QR code linking to the app).
On top of that, when you download the app there's only an option to login with instagram. If you don't have an instagram account already there's no link to create an account. Surprisingly inconvenient.
It's probably a non-starter for Meta since your non-use of an app that can siphon all sorts of precious "meta" about you for them to profit from is not available.
Hard to tell from just looking at the static analysis. The size of Compose is relatively small compared to overall dex, but our guess is that a lot of that has to do with sharing code with IG
Pretty sure they're using it on web everywhere and IMHO that's a decent choice when you need state management / DOM updates.
React Native is a whole other ball of mud, taking UI decisions out of the main thread where phones want them to be and delegating them into a bolted on javascript environment.
Clearly the Threads main ingredient is a whole lot if cringe.
The cringe of grassroots-washing a social-media clone from Mark Zuckerberg, done by just about every major news outlet over the world which, of course coincidentally, already have been subsidized by meta via „publishing deals“ for years [1].
They're probably just using an already trained model. They're almost certainly not training a model on-device.
AFAIK both the iphone and the pixel have a chip that are specifically designed to do forward propagation on a deep neural network. I don't know much about them though.
True - but what model would they want to use on-device?
All the feed ranking stuff is done serverside I assume... And apart from that, the app is just for posting and reading text and pictures. I don't really see any use for any ML there.
If one could profitably offload serverside CPU to the client then every app would be mining bitcoins on-device.
But it turns out that user complaints of a laggy app, hot phone and bad battery life (and therefore lost users and lost ad revenue) far outweigh any CPU time savings on the server.
Outside of purity, why care about this? The functional requirement of a social media app is that it has a large and active user base, and this needs to take priority over non-functional requirements like install size.
Since it was built with a lean team on a tight deadline, I can see why install size has taken a back seat. Only so many hours in a day and focusing on execution timelines and product market fit is 100x more important.
I want an app that solves a problem; not focus on a purity test.
Even beyond that, as an experienced engineer like yourself, you know sometimes you make compromises you don't necessarily agree with. Trashing others people work comes across as immature.
> What functionality is missing that you would add?
Are you being satirical? There's literally no functionality beyond the very basics. No timeline customization, advance posting, search, polls, hashtags, view customization, history management, lists, account deletion...
It's not about what functionality is missing, it's about what's there. 250 MB to show you a list of text posts and comments? Why is it so big? What does it do to warrant that?
This isn't far from the truth. Have you seen the list of App Store data collection permissions it requests? For what amounts in functionality to little more than a terminal session to a BBS? Holy shit. I verified it's longer than TikTok's which is widely assumed to be a hostile state-backed surveillance tool at this point.
For Threads, the following may be "collected and linked to your identity":
Health & Fitness
Purchases
Financial info
Location
Contact info
Contacts
User content
Search history
Browsing history
Identifiers
Usage data
Sensitive Info - whatever the hell that is [1]
Diagnostics
And my favorite, "other data" I.e. it collects so much we don't even have a category for it
[1] Apple's definition includes: racial/ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data
Those aren't permissions it requests, it has no permissions by default. Instead it's the broadest interpretation of data it could gather from any of its features and dependencies (an app granting a permission grants it to all frameworks as well). But they will have to ask about all of them, especially health data. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a broad, general list they imported from other Meta apps in the rush to ship.
It's not even anything about features or frameworks or dependencies.
It's literally just checkboxes inside App Store Connect when you submit the app.
Basically it's what Meta's lawyers think needs to be disclosed.
I'm sure they do sentiment analysis on your IG posts, put you in advertising targeting cohorts like "cancer survivor", and that's what they mean by "health data". Not that it's getting anything from the iOS Health app.
If I'm posting all day on Threads about my health, that doesn't sound like "Collection of the data occurs only in infrequent cases that are not part of your app’s primary functionality", and hence they need to declare literally anything a user might be posting about.
I'd be surprised if it actually requested it. At the same time, it could just be an overly broad interpretation of the fact that they obviously gather any health data you post about on the service.
Not really the benefit of the doubt given the app is out and no one has posted about it asking for health permission (AFAIK). Or any other permissions you wouldn't expect for social media (again, AFAIK).
Reminder that outside of devs - no one would really care if your whole app’s functionality is copy pasted across all classes, has a million dependencies and is unmanageable devwise if it brings in the dough
No company cares about purity, architecture or how beautiful the code is, the only reason most do is because it aligns with maintenance costing less and being able to develop features faster
The target consumer doesn't care, wasting time optimizing for space doesn't make sense in this instance .
I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately own the React Native project.
The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's point of view, more like a "digital subscriber."
Isn't React Native more for when you lack the resources to have engineers dedicated to building platform native solutions? Meta does not have that limitation, it does not seem surprising they would not be using React Native for this.
I always figured React Native and Flutter were meant as alternative ways to develop apps. Kinda disappointing Facebook and Google don't dogfood their own frameworks too much.
React Native isn’t good for things like news feeds. Any extremely long lists where each item has a different height, it performs poorly on
However, the RN architecture does make it incredibly easy to bind to components written in native code - or use react native components from within native code
It was never Meta’s intention that something would not contain app-specific native code
People care. You just refuse to listen to what they say.
They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't hear because they can only hear when someone talks about megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc.
1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.
2. Threads' main user base is Instagram. An hour of watching Instagram Reels is more data than the entire Threads app. I highly doubt Instagram users are data strapped.
> "my battery is drained faster"
App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out. If you're saying Threads is not optimized, I disagree. And again, considering the main targeted user base is Instagram and Twitter, Threads is going to be significantly better than either app in terms of battery life (little to no video options right now)
> 1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.
Source? This seems like a really first-world country thing to say.
We really do have expensive internet in the US. Sim cards when traveling are so cheap. I think I have a 4gb plan with Verizon and it's expensive enough for me.
Jesus christ, we're talking about a 200MB app with text-based communication. The cost of living crisis is real but to pretend that people need to limit their internet usage to save money is ridiculous.
I live in Canada which has some of the worst data plans, and even on the 5GB plans I wouldn't bat an eye on using an app like Threads.
Those users already have Instagram. Threads is competing against Twitter clones.
> App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out.
Larger apps use more radio, use more CPU for decompression, use more flash writes on updates. All use battery. Decompression and writes for background updates slow the phone. The additional flash writes lead to wear causing storage to become slower even when the app is not being used or updated.
72MB isn't stopping people downloading it. If they later decide to delete, it will be because the UX is bad, or lack of content, or something like that. Nobody says "I use this every day but I need 72MB, delete" and nobody says "this app sucks but it's only 10MB, might as well keep it".
They may make a “Lite” version of the app like they did for Facebook or WhatsApp, but Twitter’s user base is much less developing world heavy, so I doubt it. This was clearly a skunkworks project, once it is established, it will get more resources including optimization specialists. Then again, Twitter, being the abode of bro-grammers, never got it and Musk had a point when he fired most of the team.
Precisely. I had a friend who downloaded an app, but it was 2kb over the limit that he prefers to have all his apps! He promptly deleted it and left a scathing review. Naturally this picked up and a few other users refused to download the app.
off-topic, but since she's joining Meta to work on Threads, I guess we proooobably won't be getting as many of her info-dumps? kind of a bummer, love her stuff
... and React Native copied the declarative approach of React, which copied WPF, which copied ... (no, we're definitely not the first ones to do declarative UIs here in 2023).
Interested in knowing if they're made by native SDKs or React Native or, unlikely flutter.
will they do desktop apps? electronjs came to mind for that, yes it's fat but it's the only one truly cross platform now.
Not a IG, FB, Threads, Twitter user per se, just interested in what stack Meta uses to build Threads, looks like a mix of various pieces from their existing code base to me.
can someone explain to me why this is a separate app and not just a view in Instagram? IG has the potential to be Meta's Wechat and this seems like it does that journey a disservice.
It looks like UIKit, the static analysis [1] shows numerous ViewControllers (eg IGSundialSingleVideoClipEditorViewController) with various UIKit lifecycle methods like viewDidLoad, rather than SwiftUI. There's also a surprising amount of Objective-C, in fact it looks like mostly Objective-C, at least all the IG-prefixed classes. Unusual for 2023.
Honestly threads is so minimum. A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. Only thing complicated is scale. But meta has that in place. Threads team is a corporate cushion team.
Creating a minimal product that customers love is far harder than created a bloated app that has the kitchen sink approach. It's impressive to me that the devs were able to pick and choose the absolute minimum set of nice features and go with that.
> Only thing complicated is scale. But meta has that in place.
This is silly. Scale is hard. Rolling out to massive scale on the first attempt is even harder. Within the first day they got 30 million active users without any hiccups. That's not easy. Look at AAA game launches for just how hard this is to get right.
One other thing here. They choose the right minimal set of features so that rolling out and scaling quickly would be successful. Again, that's impressive, because they didn't paint themselves into a corner supporting something that is difficult to scale successfully.
No worked for corporates, startups etc. Both in small and big teams, and this is hugely unimpressive for 6 months with unlimited budget. It's not an existing project, but it's from scratch, so you dont have all the headaches or minor details.
I think it's unimpressive engineering wise (minus all that Meta does for scale, which we already knew about). I think the business execution and marketing is what's impressive.
With 1b people, you've just qualified 15% of the planet as "obnoxious, superficial, bottom of the barrel culture, cheap, narcissistic, lacking any depth.".
I'm not sure why you'd exclude Facebook users though, that's 3b or 40% of all humans.
short form social media is an industrial farm of mental illness. it surrounds you with histrionics with all the time possible to spare, minimal commitment and inundates your monkey-brained need for peer approval with their low standards.
leaving leftist online spaces was the decision that had the most positive impact on my life. any community based around a struggle will have a hard time not being a pit of vindictive envy regardless of ideology.
Tumblr leftism was much more contained though, it was hard to peer pressure targets and journalists outside the scene looking for easy stories had no ability to reproduce the gossip and slander.
Twitter's mechanics are a shouting competition, with 10% of users making up 90% of tweets, while giving users tremendous power over public figure's profiles. It turned leftist discourse into a more violent /r9k/ with a minority skin and corporate backing. I don't think the move towards a short-form platform had a non-trivial influence in this shift.
The accusation that Threads is using stolen code is one of the more embarrassing accusation for Musk that he's made. Not as embarrassing for Musk as the fabricated pedophile accusations, but definitely incredibly cringe.
The idea of stealing code for large distributed systems build on entirely different underlying compute architectures just shows how technologically clueless Musk is. Might as well measure productivity by lines of code written. Major pointy-haired boss vibes.
I’ve written against the Facebook Graph API and Twitter’s. Facebook was rock-solid (although they tightened it after Cambridge Analytica to the point it no longer supported my use-case), Twitter couldn’t go two weeks without a failure or regression of some sort. Gave me strong contempt for Twitter’s engineering culture and I suspect Meta would know this as well. As a former CTO and hiring manager, I’d certainly consider a stint at Twitter on a candidate’s resume as a black mark.
