Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss
theverge.com
theverge.com
So only the super PC, brand friendly stuff? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised given it’s Meta but disappointing if true. How can you have a public square without fostering news and political niches? That doesn’t mean you have to shove it in everyone’s feeds like Elon’s Twitter.
So it really will just be instagram with a text focus then. Was hoping all the influencer/celeb/brand focus early on was just a result of early app launch and no following feed yet.
Most people in most public squares aren’t engaging in civic discourse. They’re bantering and conversing and trading. With Reddit and Twitter simultaneously crapping the bed, there’s a valid niche for that sort of square on the internet.
We still need a public square for civic discourse. But it’s clear the current model optimises for bloviation and posturing. Maybe there’s a better model than every person their own broadcaster.
What do you think is happening on the internet or social media? Most of the internet or social media is non-political and non-news related.
> Maybe there’s a better model than every person their own broadcaster.
You are blaming 'every person' when the toxicity of news and politics is news and politics itself. It's the toxic mainstream news and politicians that are the problem. Not 'every person'.
Are those really public? I know that is just metaphor but Guardian has whole category for this topic: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/privately-owned-public-sp...
I think they are going for more promoting communities topics like sports, fashion, entertainment ect than hot topics like news and politics.
Facebook is now offering the 'cure' to a disease they spread themselves, for profit. And monetizing it, with ads from corporations who lobby heavily.
This 'cure' is another series of steps toward complete disengagement with everything that might actually improve the lives of the 99% (ie, actual politics).
Climate change is politics, inequality is politics, corruption is politics - all of it shoved under the rug in favor of yet more inane sports and celebrity trivia.
Like, isn't "small text blurbs" better than nothing? ... Do you think billionaires bought and crippled Twitter and Reddit for our sake?
We recently got hard evidence that Facebook and Twitter censored true information at the White House's request; to drive people toward a desired political outcome... On Threads, that wouldn't even have been necessary. They just call any debate they don't like 'political', and de-platform it. Silent, and deadly.
Reddit and Twitter have been suicided. That's not actually a boon, as toxic as they were pre-Musk and pre-SpezGate. Now a platform where political engagement is explicitly shadowbanned rises up to offer ever-more vacuous bullshit heavily dosed with pro-corporate propaganda, with the glimpses of substance all expressly filtered out. That's not a boon either, though that's what seems to be the spin.
I do hope your optimism isn't misplaced. Maybe driving the engaged people toward defederated platforms will work out, and we can leave the sports-minded to their own devices - but realistically, those people will be weaponized against change even more easily once the agitators have been sectioned off.
It's like the free speech zones Bush brought in - say whatever the fuck you like, in this little cage two miles from any TV cameras.
I honestly don't think they are. Small text blurbs are not actually informative. You can't engage in nuance, you can't really argue a position, and you can't really have a good debate. They're just good for bloviating, and there are lots of places where you can bloviate anyway.
As it turns out, social media short-circuited traditional methods of organizing. Those traditional methods of organizing, ie, actually knocking on doors and talking with your neighbours, were also the social glue that formed civic groups which did stuff after the protest ended, like voter drives or lobbying politicians, political tactics which actually worked.
Do you think what happened to OWS was just because of tweets lack of effectiveness? I don't believe that, and neither should you.
I did try to find the study you mentioned, as well as the podcast, but came up empty. Got a link handy?
I think why I enjoy sports so much more than politics—my ministry is the NBA and WNBA—is that it’s inherently a game so you don’t impose any of the IRL stress politics does. And to elaborate on why I find them similar is that in sports, you take stock of the landscape, analyze your standing, and strategize on improving eg optimal use of resources. And those r true over stretches of years or during a single game.
As the parent alluded to, Twitter is definitely not the place for this nuanced discourse and unfortunately any stereotypical nerd that would be more wont to honestly engage probably didn’t grow up playing a sport or at the very least not such a mainstream American sport like basketball and has no interest in the topic.
But it’s whatever. I still find great joy theorizing, seeing the results of different implementations, being presented with ideas I hadn’t thought of (these r like lineup combos and play calls), team/player growth, etc
I'm perfectly fine with an internet platform, especially if run by a private company, that explicitly embraces the fact that it's a discussion platform for fashion, video games, or whatever anime or movie someone has seen instead of some mad billionaire's experiment.
If you want politics the correct place is your local townhall, want news subscribe to a quality paper. Instagram is decent precisely because it is limited to the kind of content I trust Meta with. Politics on Twitter isn't people genuinely being productive citizens, it's political hobbyism, purely for entertainment and self-expression, politics as spectator sport.
Of course, the journalists are up in arms, but the relationship between incendiary news / Tweets and its influence on journalistic narratives reported on is a big structural risk. I think of it like separation of prop trading firms and banks, rather than having an unenforced Chinese wall between them.
I don't believe the approach is conservative in as much as it's necessary product development: you have to know your audience, your market, and by virtue that means you know what you aren't going to cater for. No hard news, no divisive politics, no journalistic commentary? Totally fair and I imagine many will find that refreshing; same reason why people come on HN for the technical niche except this time it's optimised for Instagrammers and influencers.
Musk made his own play with Twitter in a similar vein by choosing what audience he preferred to cater to and, in effect, scored an own goal of epic proportions. A truly ludicrous display given Twitter's ubiquity before he took the reins.
So it's literally nothing more than text-based Instagram.
If "The goal isn't to replace Twitter", then what's the point, and why rush the launch, with a ton of missing features, just to take advantage of Twitter's latest problems? ("This was a lot more of a yolo launch than anything we've done in a long while." https://www.threads.net/t/CuZpfirN81T)
As if these industries aren't often political
It is just a narrative to counter Twitter’s lawsuit.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/07/1186367564/threads-meta-twitt...
There's no lawsuit. There was a letter sent from Twitter's lawyer, and it's a complete joke. Meta has already denied that any former Twitter employees worked on Threads.
You can also counter lawsuit by preventing it to happen. (Letter was threat)
And it does not matter what Meta says. If someone wants to sue, court it is.
And it would be interesting case, since they are quite identical apps.
> And it does not matter what Meta says. If someone wants to sue, court it is.
You just contradicted yourself.
You are either implying that either it is impossible to influence things by saying things or that countering cannot also happen beforhand if the lawsuit happens (while also helps in preventing that). Why people argue about everything.
Killing the fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...
So Meta launched Threads without fediverse support, for the primary purpose of killing the fediverse? That makes a lot of sense...
Not to mention that the fediverse was never a threat to Meta.
To corrupt and destroy the Fediverse, with a 'Twitter killer' narrative to the point where not even the anti-trust enforcers can begin to argue that Threads has lock-in since the users can move off of Threads. (Which they won't move anyway.)
But we'll see when Meta eventually begins to screw over their users. I doubt they would care. But at this point, they are the new Fediverse.
Threads launched without Fediverse support, so this makes no sense.
With 90M users, they are essentially the new Fediverse. All other Mastodon instances see that as a threat and banned it in advance. Otherwise those NDAs would never have been signed or sent in the first place to those admins of large instances. Might as well have been a blank document if they were joking.
In reality, it has already split and corrupted the Fediverse. (Thanks to the signed NDAs.)
You mentioned Fediverse support as somehow protecting Threads from antitrust regulators (a dubious notion itself), but there wouldn't be any need to protect Threads from antitrust regulators if threads didn't exist! What exactly is the raison d'être of Threads, if not to replace Twitter?
I know you love to bash Mastodon, but it's a red herring to this discussion.
The bare-bones launch of Threads seems to reveal Meta's priorities: the algorithmic feed, and the promotion of brands and influencers.
By "all" you mean the fraction of a fraction of moderators of specific instances that signed onto the petition.
The vast majority of Mastodon instances will happily federate. My instance definitely will. Why not, it's free content
If anything, threads proved how slow mastodons growth was, and how small the fediverse is.
Instagram is very political. It's like half political action related infographics at this point.
The algorithm is probably showing you political stuff, but its definitely not the majority of content.
One potential saving grace is the future ActivityPub support that will let you access Mastadon and the rest of the Fediverse from the Threads app, but it remains to be seen how they actually implement it.
I wonder if this is for the new Canadian Law meta and google needs to deal with.
As for politics, will that mean no political ads from people running for office ?
That's actually kind of compelling. When twitter was just random weirdos and comedians it was a lot more enjoyable.
You really think Meta is sweating over what Canada thinks? (Am Canadian)
Also, they want to differentiate this Thread place from other places. Saying that news is not the point is a good idea I think. Even though I don’t like Meta and don’t want them to succeed.
People can obviously post on their stories - but I think there is something about a photo based medium that makes some people reluctant to post at all or slide into other people's DMs.
Is it just to show me celebrity one liners? Show me obvious product placements.. or heavily promoted movies?
I wonder how many people are working on this barebones implementation.
This is a bold strategy - let's see how it works out...
> "Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads - they have on Instagram as well to some extent - but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals."
We're building forth.news, which is sort of the exact opposite of this view point. We're only news. Only journalists post, so theres no hate speech, no spam, and no misinfo.
If you want to get headlines, and you want to curate your own feed, check out https://www.forth.news
This is such a bad take that you actually made me laugh out loud. Not trying to be negative but I believe you need to discuss the idea with real people before going all-in. There are plenty of misinformation in any "legit" newspaper. Journalist also isn't a protected title in a lot of countries so anyone can call themselves a journalist. It doesn't automatically make your claims true. On the contrary, a lot of people go into journalism because they are passionate about certain topics, similar to activists.
I know journalism has a bad rap in some circles, but most reporters are genuinely trying to share real stories.
In fact, I would consider your original claim to be "misinfo", so I hope you aren't spreading it on your fancy new site.
When Threads federates with Mastodon, we will see the news and politics they are trying to avoid.
But for now:
> Threads isn’t for news
We should assume it is for data collection for Meta, otherwise why has it not launched in the EU?