Facebook's Threads is so depressing | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Threads is so depressing

jogblog.substack.com

78 pointsfreddyym77 comments

His main point is that it is forced and artificial. One vague heuristic a lot of people consider is the value of a social network depends on its "weird" subcultures. I feel however everything is far more sanitized and corporate friendly now. I really can't imagine a fun, weird subculture forming on threads.

Surely it will take more than the few hours the platform has been open for these groups to form? “And don’t call me Shirley!” :)

At the moment there is no discovery or privacy to speak of, just most popular thing at top. A smart thing to do could be topics or rooms since there's a whole other market to be captured there right now.

Yep, Twitter has many "weird subculture" communities where people make obscure references, have their own values and in-jokes, &c. It does feel like these newer platforms are so artificial and cleaned up, and just so right-on and politically correct.

I'm not going to sign up but like...has he seen Linkedin recently?

> It’s better than Twitter, of course, which has Berlin 1937-vibes.

Other than giving himself away as a hyperbolic partisan ass, the rest of the article was really funny. I said something similar about the metaverse: it's not really possible to build a community at scale out of nothing like this. Organic growth is what makes something authentic, if you just plop down a multi-million user new community, it gets all of the problems or a big platform without any of the entrenched good stuff that made it popular. It will be interesting to see if it's possible to convert, I doubt it because it will require a patience and stubbornness that Meta has never shown.

Threads is an interesting move because of the context. However, I believe that Facebook will continue to alienate a large segment of its users through its aggressive bias. You can't please everyone, but simply censoring and banning one political side is not a viable approach. As we saw with the Twitter files this ultimately snowballs, creating a larger problem that will resurface.

I'm not optimistic about the Threads product, but I think its failure will be a positive overall impact on public discourse.

Facebook isn't our friend. Zuck doesn't want a "more friendly place" he wants censorship and monetization.

The “Twitter Files” was a giant nothingburger fraudulently peddled as some sort of exposé by bad faith actors. Ultimately, these platforms want to have it all - the sole right to sell ads against content, while having no liability over that content. Tech platforms should have a financial responsibility with respect to the harms their content causes. Aggressive moderation against slander, harmful conspiracy theories that destabilize our politics and public health, and incitement to insurrection are easy pickings to ban. That one political party overtly embraces this shitshow doesn’t make it “political.”

Wait, holdup a second. You think a company handing over personal data to the FBI and censoring free speech isn't a "shitshow" but the REAL shitshow is that investigative journalists are "bad faith actors"?

I don’t know, if someone keeps posting lies and then Facebook decides to say you this dude is a liar. Feels pretty fair, sorry one side decided lies are core to their political identity.

Edit: it’s not one side, it’s a small minority of loud mouthed assholes.

> Edit: it’s not one side, it’s a small minority of loud mouthed assholes.

That the rest of them happily accept as long as it puts them in power.

> it’s a small minority of loud mouthed assholes.

Ah I see you understand that intimately.

Since you mention it, what part of the Twitter files was most damning? Can you share that part?

Zuckerberg hired Joel Kaplan as Facebook’s VP of public policy to shape political speech policy. Kaplan was a former clerk for Antonin Scalia, a lawyer for W. Bush during the 2000 recount and eventually his chief of staff[1]. Kaplan regularly intervened to stop enforcement of terms of service violations for, as you said, “one political side”[2]. He also successfully advocated to _not_ update Facebook’s recommendation algorithm to promote neutral, non-political content because it would make Facebook appear bias against conservatives[3]. Despite all of this “one political side” continues to claim they are unfairly targeted.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan [2] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-joel-kaplan-washington-... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...

> but simply censoring and banning one political side is not a viable approach

Citation needed.

There are tons of claims but from what I can see not a lot of proof. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-co...

Twitter is a bunch of journalists snarking about the news. Seems like threads is a bunch of Instagram celebrities using a 2nd medium for brand management. It seems like people are only there in case it takes off and that’s not going to be interesting conversation.

If you dismiss Twitter so easily, it’s clear you don’t have much to add. It is (was?) a lot more than “journalists snarking about the news”. Customer service, influencers, sports fans arguing, companies microblogging, bots giving updates, comedians, musicians - these are just a few things I can think of that were on Twitter.

That's what Google+ was, too. People who already had online communities on four websites temporarily added a fifth to hedge their bets until it was clear that G+ was not destined for greatness.

I think you'll find that there are a large number of normies on Twitter, if you look under the hood.

you dont even need to look under the hood, you just need to know a handful of normies

I joined mastodon relatively early and really enjoyed the experience. I’m a believer in the fediverse so I hope Threads takes off

Yesterday I learned that a significant part of the fediverse (major instances, users) will actively block Threads.

I'm also seeing a lot of toots from users lobbying their instances to do the same. Including the instance I chose.

Personally I want to see Threads' content and I'd prefer to do so from within Mastodon. But if Mastodon wants to be a nice cozy closed echo chamber instead of federating with those (soon to be) 500M new users that's also fine. It's just not what I was promised/thought I was signing up for, so I'll leave (I won't self host).

> Personally I'll just leave Mastodon if it happens.

Just change to a homeserver that moderates the way you agree with. Mine made a poll and it doesn't look like there will be any restrictions on federating with Threads.

Those two things are very contradictory. Threads taking off is the death of the fediverse in the long run.

Threads seems to be poised to take the Fediverse mainstream. Whether it's the first step in an Embrace/Extend/Extinguish strategy is not really relevant. The fact remains that Meta will bring the idea of "yourname@fediverse-domain.com" identities into mainstream consciousness. I suspect that this will be good for the Fediverse, at least in the short term.

That said, I'm worried that Meta will only choose to federate with a whitelist of ActivityPub instances, which would certainly be a long term harm to the Fediverse. Maybe they'll prove me wrong though. Zuck is more philosophical than people give him credit for, and I think he's aware of the mistakes he made that caused people to lose trust in Meta. He has an opportunity to embrace (for better or worse) federation as a way to distinguish Meta from its increasingly centralized peers.

It's also an opportunity to expose the disingenuity of Musk, who ironically promised to "turn the platform into 'something new that’s decentralized" [0] but is now suing Meta for making a product that more closely resembles that description than does Musk's recent behavior of view limits and auth walls.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-had-a-plan-to-fix-social...

This is probably true. But how long should we wait for the fediverse to get its act together? There’s a critical mass of people who want to leave Twitter and lots of pent up demand.

My first testing of the waters in the fediverse was about a year ago and I ended up looking at lots of "also on mastodon" variants of Twitter accounts I liked to read. Only slowly I realized that most of those weren't "I'm also on mastodon" operated by the same people but passive mirrors, most not even operated by someone in any way related to the original account. On paper that looks good, "hey, you can also follow x, y and z on mastodon!" but in reality the feeling of merely looking at shadows was extremely present, almost like in plato's cave. Now that Twitter is trying hard to silence the APIs of sneaking behind those "shadows", my mastodon feels much better. It's almost as if Musk fixed a huge mastodon bug.

It's been working just fine for years. The people don't want a platform they have to genuinely participate in. They want celebrities, corporations and their data to be stolen and sold to see it as a successful platform for mindlessly browsing.

Are you implying that the fediverse failed because the builders of the main apps don’t understand the market, that they’re unwilling to give people what they want out of a platform, or something else?

I don't think the fediverse failed. I think the average joe doesn't sign up for Mastodon and Kbin because it doesn't have celebrities, corporations, ads and data harvesting. Celebrities and corporations needs to be paid, at least initially, to be on the platform which a decentralized platform is never going to do.

I can confirm that when I’m shopping at WalMart and polling average Joes on why they aren’t joining Mastodon, one of the top reasons they cite is the lack of data harvesting, followed closely by the lack of ads. Perhaps the fediverse can avoid the fate you’re predicting if they add in maybe just a little data harvesting?

You can't pay for celebrities and attract businesses without ads and data harvesting. The point is that the fediverse is not a for profit business.

Celebrities get a lot out of these platforms without having to be paid. They get everything that us normies do (because, ultimately, celebrities are people too) PLUS they get all the promotional advantages, a direct feedback loop (which many crave, despite claims to the contrary), etc.

Most celebrities didn't need to be paid to get an email address.

At this growth rate, Threads is the new Fediverse. Since already exactly in 24 hours after launch, it is double the size of the old Fediverse.

Their goal is be compatible with the old fediverse, gain all the users by showing all the instances content, then become incompatible with the old fediverse and kill it. Then at that point there is no more fediverse because Threads by itself is not a federated system.

I firmly believe this is the case. They will lure in users with things like video hosting and better spam filtering, while making it increasingly harder for the fediverse to exist (for example by participating in the development of the common interfaces and making them increasingly complex), then eventually just closing off altogether when they have large enough user base.

Having corporations participate to fediverse will only be a bad thing, apart from some short term gains.

i'm seeing a lot of support on lemmy and mastodon for defederating with servers that are associated with meta. i also hope threads takes off, and i would prefer to see everything integrated, but i wonder how difficult things will be for meta here.

it's possible that it just doesn't matter at all, and in fact the centralization is a selling point for pretty much everyone who isn't a nerd about federation.

we'll see.

Do you mean "takes off" in the Canadian sense? Like "Take off, eh."

Does anyone know if it is possible in Threads to only show content from people I follow?

it's not possible currently

What the fuck. So basically it's a very large ad for people who are already famous? Again what the fuck.

>What the fuck. So basically it's a very large ad for people who are already famous? Again what the fuck.

I'm sure the Twitter limit debacle had them ship it before it was completely ready. They've already said that's actively in the works. It's not an intentional design decision, it's a feature that's not ready.

Sounds like they might have overplayed their hand. If it's seriously as bad as not even having a feed, surely people are going to get bored and dump it - that first impression is pretty important right? Signing up is one thing, the migration actively needs usage, though.

I made an account, but I'm not really using the service as its missing 2 big things for me. A feed of only those I follow and hashtags.

mmmmmmm-oney.

Always be selling. Who do you sell Threads to?

Threads seems like a great example of commoditize your complement.[1]

If you can start with the premise that the primary paying audience for both Twitter and Instagram are advertisers then the value Threads provides to Meta is to provide an additional feature bundle to those advertisers. Basically:

"Hey look Mr. Brand Advertiser, included in your $999 a month Instagram ad subscription, you now get access to Threads (our Twitter clone) with 1K Thread ad impressions bundled in for free - for a limited time only."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

One advantage of threads over Facebook is that with threads there’s no expectation of privacy for people to get confused about. That’s refreshing

Maybe it's just me, but I remember a time where online defaulted to private and anonymous.

facebook.com shifted that paradigm. Making people's conversations with friends as public as possible (via the news feed) turned out to be a fantastic way to incentivise more of that behaviour.

From there it was a short leap to apps like Venmo, where your monetary transactions are public by default. If PayPal had defaulted to public transactions upon launch a decade earlier people would have spurned it.

I remember when online defaulted to anonymous, but I don't remember it ever being very private? Most forums or chat systems that predate facebook were public by default, with the users full history in plain view.

I suppose posting photos of yourself or your kids publicly wasn't that common prior to facebook, though.

I think you can tell a lot about the author based on the fact that they think Bluesky is “free flowing and authentic”

I don’t think I want an invite anymore

The fact that Threads doesn't even work on desktop is enough to disqualify it from ever being used for "serious" use-cases in my opinion. If nothing else, it's enough to make it unusable for personally.

The fact that the advertised Fediverse integration doesn't even exist in the current version is very funny to me as well.

I feel like it will find its niche with people who feel comfortable on Instagram, but it certainly doesn't come close to replacing Twitter for me.

Yeah, this feels exactly like the Google+ launch.

And of course that the thread got flagged, for whatever reason.

Threads is an MVP to get people who are fed up with Twitter. It works and they're committed to improving it.

I don't think Threads will have the same fate as other Facebook/Meta products simply because the sign up process is so painless. If you use Instagram (which like 1bn+ people do) then signing up just means downloading the app and pressing a couple of buttons. So barrier of entry is extremely low and Instagram is still popular with young people.

Facebook was forgotten by young people already in 2012, so Facebook Poke was not really going to compete. I don't think you can draw parallels there.

I'm excited to see if they can innovate in the space. I don't really see Zuckerberg as a bad figure.

Actually there are currently over 2.35 billion monthly active Instagram users. Instagram achieved the 2 billion mark in the 3rd quarter of 2021, and it is estimated to reach over 2.5 billion MAUs by the end of 2023.

https://www.demandsage.com/instagram-statistics/

I don’t have an instagram account and don’t plan on having one. My Facebook account is basically dormant. Threads would be interesting in any way at all if you could use a WhatsApp account for it. Maybe.

Source that 1B people use Instagram?

Two billion as of 10/22

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/meta-s-in...

Holy crap.

Nice bit of polemic. but essentially content-free.

I enjoyed the read. Chucked a few times. Some of the one liners are quite subtle.

Threads has such a feigned positivity feeling to it. It's uncomfortable. Like the entire app is an HR cultural video. I'm sure the influencers they poached to the app were given a list of threads to post like "What's an inspiration quote you guys like?" or "What books have you read recently?" Of course this is all intentional since the end goal is just placating advertisers when they eventually add ads to the feed.

Maybe when Meta is done paying people off to post fake things the real culture will make it through.

Threads has been out for… one full day? Maybe the histrionics are premature? Maybe the everyone-has-an-opinion-and-is-therefore-a-pundit motif can take one day off to let a new product breathe?

This was an entertainingly written piece.

Threads, as an MVP, does not yet have the ability to see only content from those you follow. That hardly means it won't. Already, activity from those you follow shows up first in your feed, so TBH it's a pretty good experience until you run out of followees' content. It's extremely premature to write it off.

> Threads, as an MVP,

> It's extremely premature to write it off

Meta isn't exactly a startup. I think it's fair to hold them to a high standard.

One the first day ?

I don’t think that feature is worth delaying the launch

It's not like they built the app in one day.

Anecdotally, many are trying the app, realizing it's half baked (for various reasons), and dropping it right then and there. They only tried it because they were curious and now they know.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

Meta is a 730 billion dollar company so seems like they should be able to do better.

"Done is better than perfect" is still a good phrase for Meta.

It isn't done, though. That's the problem.

> Like a $19 turkey sandwich at an airport

What's wrong with $19 turkey sandwich, is delicatessen 25€ turkey sandwich better?

Wait do you think that food is cheaper inside of airports than it is outside of them?

Not a fan of Threads, but even less of a fan of Twitter.

So I'd personally want Threads to succeed. Everything about Twitter is broken especially in the recent months. I'm not saying Threads is good, but Threads at least has a chance not to be as bad as Twitter. Also fediverse support in the future is a huge plus.

I can’t wait for it to be filled with 75/25 advertising to social post ratio.

> Mark “My other platform enabled a literal genocide” Zuckerberg

Can everyone agree to refer to Zuck like this from now on?

> But if not, uh, I guess you can follow me on Threads.

All that melodrama, complaining and whining in the blog post and then ends up using Threads.

Quite amusing to read.

> Mark “My other platform enabled a literal genocide” Zuckerberg

Into the garbage bin it goes.

These complaints are so cringe. This looks just a stupid as twitter. Complaining about twitter sucking and threads sucking is so weird. People seem to think highly of twitter more so than it ever was.

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