This isn't a critique of Threads, this a commentary on the nature of social graphs and different identities in different spaces. People use IG different than they use Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc.
You could get the same experience on Twitter by following Dora the Explorer, Procter and Gamble, your uncle, and Brian Chesky but you have chosen to have a specific experience in that app by curating your feed.
A better example, port LinkedIn's graph to Snapchat and it would seem like absolute nonsense.
IG ported a visual social graph to a text based app, this, by definition, isn't going to produce the most optimal experience. Thats 100% fine though, you'll realize who is good at posting text content, follow them, you'll unfollow the people that are not good, etc.
This is why TikTok was interesting in the first place because it removed the curation step and created an interest graph instead of a social one. What the poster is talking about is the friction inheirent to using a social graph as a proxy for an interest graph.
"I love when you talk about tech but I don't care at all about your dog."
I get this a lot on Twitter. There is a very interesting tech account that I follow that half the time is complaining about British politics. It's really frustrating, since I don't want to ditch the tech posts
I was briefly in a Facebook A/B test that automatically categorized every post by everyone. I then had the option to "Unfollow Alice for posts about Politics". It was glorious, and I always wonder why they never released that broadly.
That, plus hours after deployment it would hit US national news, and hours later you'd have politicians accusing Meta/Facebook of bias because their political spam was correctly labeled as political spam, but the opposite side's politician's cooking recipes were NOT labeled as political spam, which reeks of favorism, bias, and is anti-democratic in several different ways.
Interestingly, I can see this going either direction. In my case, this feature caused me to refollow Alice, enabling me to see most of her posts and thus increasing my engagement.
OTOH, I bet not many people use the "stay friends but unfollow them" functionality.
I think it just comes down to if you see yourself as an entertainer or not.
Social media based on a social graph forces you to be niche because you have to be that proxy for interest. i.e. it's. better to have three people who post about tech, British politics, and Seinfeld separately than one person who posts about Seinfeld one day, politics the next and tech the next because it is impossible for me to curate my feed correctly.
Ironically, If you ONLY posted about the tech of all of the political scenes in Seinfeld that included British actors, that would be fine.
If you don't see yourself as an entertainer, or put another way, if you're not trying to build an audience, then you can bring your whole self or post about whatever you're interested and passionate about knowing that people will be upset when you don't post what they are interested in and that you won't build as big of a following.
There is a widespread tendency on HN to complain about various forms of noise/distraction. Whether it is the unusability of the web without an ad blocker, or the apparently impossible task of using Google these days (too many useless links returned).
I strongly feel that, unless you have some acknowledged difficulty in dealing with extraneous information, it is just not reasonable to expect the world's data to be presented to you prefiltered, "on a plate". If you do have a recognized problem with information overload, you'll have to accept that some info sources are not for you. This is not ableism.
> I strongly feel that, unless you have some acknowledged difficulty in dealing with extraneous information, it is just not reasonable to expect the world's data to be presented to you prefiltered, "on a plate". If you do have a recognized problem with information overload, you'll have to accept that some info sources are not for you. This is not ableism.
This is an incredible take, I strongly agree. I haven’t been able to articulate my thoughts as well as you have here but I completely agree.
This is incredibly reductionist and I’m not trying to strawman here but I feel it’s appropriate. There’s this huge group of people that absolutely despise & openly mock Apple users but simultaneously seem to want some extreme guide rails in their web experience. Absolute lunacy, lol.
I had a similar experience on Twitter. There was this guy who used to talk a lot about technical details related to his successful rocket business. But over time that stuff was replaced by right-wing culture war politics. Sad.
There's the similar but related problem of "I'm more interested in creative posts today, but there's no way for me to register that intent". So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
Instagram's "explore" page works pretty excellently for this; each post on the grid there is essentially a separate feed. For example on mine the top several posts are: queer art, Zelda, car crash videos, less specific art, 40k memes, politics relevant to me, cat memes, and so on. Each of those is something that Instagram has good reason to think I'd like, and the posts stay fairly consistent with the vibe of the first post as I scroll through any of those feeds.
> So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
FYI, TikTok also has explicit like/dislike signals. For example, you can love posts, or long-press the video and choose "Not Interested".
Right, but what does "dislike" or "not interested" do? It's not that I hate it completely, but it's just not what I want to look at right now. So instead, I'm going to swipe through until I find some related stuff, like that, then hope the algorithm picks up on it. And then tomorrow, I have to get it to unlearn that because I'm looking for something else.
From what I've seen, loving a post has less impact that watching a video loop a few times. It appears that view time is the strongest signal, which seems logical.
And yet, that's so frustrating because sometimes I'm just curious! I really hate platforms that implicitly use view time as a signal because I have to be aware of that and make sure I don't spend too long on certain kinds of content. It forces me to "keep moving or else it'll learn something wrong about me", but since it's implicit there's no real way to know what it learned.
I agree, but it allowed meta to say they had a bajillion users from day one, and make the news. Nothing worse than an empty social network to make people run away.
Totally. I think they did the exact right thing. Brilliant strategy because not only does it kick start the network, but it introduces a entirely new group of people to text based social media that never tried/were into Twitter.
The way I used twitter (and now threads) is just by navigating directly to the URL of the accounts I want to read. I'd discover other accounts I'd want to "follow" usually via re-tweets.
In this way Threads is going to be the exact same experience for me as long as the same accounts I read on Twitter are posting on Threads.
You could get the same experience on Twitter by following Dora the Explorer, Procter and Gamble, your uncle, and Brian Chesky but you have chosen to have a specific experience in that app by curating your feed.
A better example, port LinkedIn's graph to Snapchat and it would seem like absolute nonsense.
IG ported a visual social graph to a text based app, this, by definition, isn't going to produce the most optimal experience. Thats 100% fine though, you'll realize who is good at posting text content, follow them, you'll unfollow the people that are not good, etc.
This is why TikTok was interesting in the first place because it removed the curation step and created an interest graph instead of a social one. What the poster is talking about is the friction inheirent to using a social graph as a proxy for an interest graph.
"I love when you talk about tech but I don't care at all about your dog."