It’s been a year since Meta ousted Threads in an attempt to take over the platform now known as X. Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that he hoped to turn it into “a public conversation app with over 1 billion people.”
Meta’s timing was good. Threads launched at a particularly chaotic moment for Twitter, when many people were looking for alternatives. Threads saw 30 million signups on its first day, and the app has since grown to monthly users, according to Zuckerberg. (X has monthly users, according to Elon Musk.)
But the first iteration of Threads was still a bit broken. There was no web version and many . The company has promised interoperability with ActivityPub, the open-source standard that powers Mastodon and other apps in the fediverse, but the integration remains.
A year later, it’s still not entirely clear what Threads is actually for. Its leader that “the goal is not to replace Twitter,” but to create a “public square” for Instagram users and “a less angry place for conversations.” But the service itself still has a number of problems that prevent it from realizing this. vision If Meta really wants to make this happen, here’s what should change.
Fix the “For You” algorithm.
If you follow me on the threads, you probably already know this is my main complaint. However, Meta desperately needs to fix the algorithm that powers the default Threads “For You” feed. The algorithmic feed that is the default view in both the app and the web is painfully slow. Days-old posts often appear, even during important, newsworthy moments when many people are posting on the same topic.
It’s so bad that it’s become a common meme to post something along the lines of “I can’t wait to read about it tomorrow on my For You feed” every time there’s a major event or trending story.
The algorithmic resource is also completely bizarre. For a platform built on Instagram, an app that has extremely fine-tuned recommendations and over a decade of data on topics I care about, it doesn’t seem to use any of that. Instead, it has a particular preference for intensely personal stories from accounts I have no connection with at all.
Over the past year, I’ve seen countless multi-part posts from complete strangers detailing childhood abuse, eating disorders, chronic illness, domestic violence, pet loss, and other unimaginable horrors. These aren’t posts I’m looking for by any means, but the Meta algorithm pushes them to the top of my feed.
I aggressively used swipe Threads to try to rid myself of my source of excessive trauma and it helped to some extent. But it hasn’t improved the number of weird posts I can see completely randomly Individuals. At the moment, the two main posts in my feed are an event planner offering wedding tips and a woman describing a phone call from her health insurance company. (Both posts are 12 hours old.) These types of posts have led to blogger Max Read dubbing Threads “” because they make it feel like everyone is “suffering from some sort of minor brain damage”.
Stop avoiding news, politics and anything “potentially sensitive”
Look, I understand why Meta has been cautious about moderating content in threads. Society doesn’t exactly have a great record on issues like extremism, health misinformation, or hate speech inciting genocide. No wonder they would want to avoid similar headlines about Threads.
But if Meta wants Threads to be a “public square,” it can’t search topics like COVID-19 and vaccines just because they’re “potentially sensitive.” (Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said last October that the measure was “temporary.”) If Meta wants Threads to be a “public square,” it shouldn’t be political content from user recommendations; and thread leaders should not assume that users will see the messages.
DM, DM, DM
A year in, it’s painfully clear that a platform like Threads is crippled without a proper direct messaging feature. For some reason, the leaders of Threads, especially Mosser, were adamantly against creating a separate box for the application.
Instead, users hoping to connect with someone privately on Threads are forced to go to Instagram and hope the person they’re trying to reach accepts new message requests. There is a way to post a friend on Instagram in Threads, but it depends on whether you’re already connected to Instagram.
It’s not exactly clear why Threads can’t have its own messaging feature. Mosseri suggested there’s no point in building a new box for the app, but that ignores the fact that many people use Instagram and Threads very differently. Which brings me to…
Separate threads from Instagram
Meta that the reason she was able to get Threads out the door so quickly was thanks in large part to Instagram. Threads was built using a lot of Instagram’s code and infrastructure, which also helped the company get tens of millions of people to sign up for the app on
However, requiring an Instagram account to use Threads doesn’t make sense after a year. First, it cuts out a significant amount of people who might be interested in Threads but don’t want to be on Instagram,
There’s also the fact that apps, while sharing some design elements, are completely different kinds of services. And many people, myself included, use Instagram and Threads very differently.
A “public square” platform like Threads works best for public accounts where conversations can have maximum visibility. But most people I know use their Instagram accounts for personal updates like family photos. And while you may have different visibility settings for each app, you shouldn’t be forced to link the two accounts. This also means that if you want to use threads anonymously, you’ll need to create an entirely new Instagram account to serve as the login for the corresponding thread account.
At least the Meta seems to be considering it. said Mosseri s Platformer that the company is “working on things like thread-only accounts” and wants the app to become “more self-contained.”
These aren’t the only factors that determine whether Threads will be, as Zuckerberg speculated, the next Meta app with 1 billion users. Meta will eventually have to monetize the service, which is currently ad-free. But before Meta’s multibillion-dollar ad machine can be aimed at Threads, the company will need to better explain who its latest app is actually for.