How the new Threads app is made
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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’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.
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.
Here is a common thing that happens to me:
- someone sends me a funny post
- I want to "like" it or save it or whatever
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
At least, the first time in a while
YouTube Shorts also exists to compete with TikTok.
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!
* 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.
For example, try this link in a private browser window: https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/
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?
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.
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.
My perception is that a lot here have accounts (though less than the portion of society at large), but few use them much.
Not sure how to get actual data on this though.
HN supports poll posts
Although they did do a very good job. The app is well thought out and the service has been rock solid since launch.
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!"
Can't praise a thing I can't access,
Yours truly,
- EU citizen
P.S no web interface in 2023?
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.
Also the Reddit situation was very dramatic and adversarial, Threads is just a new boring product with a clean launch.
There isn't much to say.
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
In a way they are in a cage match only it's Threads vs Twitter.
It’s like kids got a new toy. Any toy. So they gotta play with it.
I honestly can’t imagine a source like the New York Times not having an article. Twitter’s threatened lawsuit alone merited coverage.
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 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).
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a strong likelihood Threads exists as a Twitter alternative but not necessarily a direct competitor, simply because of demographics.
Out of a 244.2 MB App on iOS.
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 made the right call to get to market fast.
So, like every other first version of a software or hardware release, from Facebook to the iPhone?
> never a good plan.
Sure, the history of those decisions is littered with tech-debt-ridden corpses, but likewise is also how every success starts it's way.
It might not be a good plan for employee work-life balance, but in a tech recession where noone is hiring, it's a GREAT plan.
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.
Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going to hell.
Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP that fast.
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.
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.
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.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
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?
I agree with your overall conclusion however. Going to market with something is more important than optimizing for size.
Source: former FB employee
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
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87522273&caseType=SERIAL_...
and "Threads Group, Inc." is really the people behinds threads.com
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/threads-aa50
"Barcelona" might really have been available. "Threads Group, Inc." would be within their rights to make Meta change the name.
Meta's use of the term "Threads" for a communications service likely actually predates or at least rival's "Threads Group, Inc.".
Meta had an app called Threads until it was shut down in late 2021.
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 usually watch and like comedians when I am mindlessly scrolling.
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'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.
Twitter has 450 million monthly active users at a generous guess.
Facebook's MAU: 2.98 billion
Instagram's MAU: 1 billion
Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks.
Unlike most, Facebook actually knows how to build a social network, and grow it.
Not really considering they desperately tried to get out of buying it.
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.
Threads is not a threat at the moment. Everyone I follow has already gone back to Twitter and hasn’t posted on threads since the first day.
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
Twitter doesn't really enter the equation.
They announced its coming.
I’m guessing they just didn’t want anyone to see an empty feed on signup day.
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.
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.
> the priority is the mobile apps, but we are working on www
https://www.threads.net/t/CuWp3eMNE8h/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
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.
Weird.
https://www.threads.net/t/CuW_fXZOgPc/ would suggest to me the answer is "not much"
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.
And FB performance degrading every month. I mostly use FB groups.
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].
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/05/new-york-timesfacebo...
Are they using on-device ML? Why?
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.
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.
Every bit of ML you can offload on your clients is one you don't have to pay for.
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.
1. Gyroscope creates a lot of data for every millisecond, so it doesn't makes any sense to send all of it over to the server.
2. You only need to recognise certain keywords/movements of the user for somewhat accurate ad-tracking and behavourial analysis.
3. You don't need to prompt the user to allow access to it.
Video/image filters. Very popular on snapchat, instagram, tiktok, etc. If you want to compete with those services you have them.
classic shitware
What functionality is missing that you would add?
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
I'm sure there's a valid reason for all this...
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.
Apple guidelines, especially around user-submitted content, have some leeway in interpretation if they are "optional to disclose" or not. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-privacy-details/#o...
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.
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...
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.
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
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."
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
Nobody cares.
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.
"The customer is always right in matters of taste."
Downloads are one thing. People are curious. Will they keep it?
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)
> "my phone is slow"
Same as above, basically.
Source? This seems like a really first-world country thing to say.
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.
First world countries tend to have lower data caps and higher cost per GB on average: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-of-mobile-data-worldwi...
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.
The official Mastodon app weighs in at 70MB on my iOS device right now.
The store listing puts it at 58MB: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/i...
As for the app itself, feels very bare bones to me, and I dislike Zuckerberg locking us into another walled garden with no web access.
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose
Only two HN threads with comments discussing this one:
It's probably more correct to say that both frameworks copied React Native and made it more "native"
what is the benefit of using webview instead native for the sign-in?
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.
I’ve run into a few people that have actually deployed go on android in production. It works surprisingly well.
[1] https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcel...
That said, if there’s any home screen widgets or a watch app, they will be SwiftUI
So, a solo dev cannot, in fact, pull this off.
I mean getting the API in order is the hard work.
> 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.
Horribly.