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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Facebook isnt going to be nice about this. They know they are in a strong position here.

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.

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I don't think it's that sinister. Time based sorting is a bad day 1 feature since nobody has much of a follow graph yet. Forcing the algorithm is a good way to make sure your feed feels "full" even if you're starting from zero. I don't like the algorithm either, it's full of brands and spammy meme pages that lifted their content over from IG. But in terms of cold-starting a social graph, I get it. Plus they already said they're going to add a chrono feed soon.

I second the previous user, any lack of time-based sorting means I'm gonna waste a lot of time (which is what Meta wants). Been there with other socials, done that, not interested.

I thought it pulled your social graph from Instagram.

It offers to, but nobody has posted anything yet, so a follower-only timeline will need a week or two to get content.

> The fact that it didn't release with an ability to time-sort tells you everything you need to know.

They announced its coming.

I’m guessing they just didn’t want anyone to see an empty feed on signup day.

You can tell they're having a lot of launch day backend pains. Push notifications are sometimes up to a day delayed. Follows don't stay followed, auto-follow on join doesn't seem to work at all. QTs don't show up properly half the time. Refreshing the feed takes forever, and you can tell when it fails to load your personalized feed, it just falls back on a generic feed with a bunch of random people. Even loading a profile page takes a noticeably long amount of time.

A strong position? They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks and their odds are... OK at best. They have every incentive to make their new service as desirable and accessible as possible (until such time they are too big for people to leave and then they can do whatever they want).

> They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks

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.

> Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks. By active users, yes Twitter is smaller than many of the other big networks. But by influence, Twitter is one of, if not the biggest fish in the pond. @[username] is everywhere in advertising and news programs. People don't break news on Facebook and Instagram. There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion for Twitter, and it wasn't the revenue per user. It was buying influence.

> There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion for Twitter

Not really considering they desperately tried to get out of buying it.

The last year has significantly weakened Twitter's position. Musk paid $44B for a company that was almost immediately worth less; he has massively harmed it's image for further valuation reduction. The recent "must be logged in to view tweets" and "only X00 items available" combined with the increase in hate speech weakened it even further.

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.

75% of the staff were useless. And that’s been evident over the last 6 months.

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.

The reason Musk wanted to buy Twitter was to satisfy bis own enormous ego and whims. He did try to get out of buying it though.

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.

Why would they need people with novel ideas? Most users are happy to consume reposts and influencer spam ad infinitum, and they're probably the most monetizable segment.

These are the high value people that make one social network more valuable than others.

I dunno, I think the real market for "Threads" is brands and brands want some place that is innocuous. It seems the worst threat to Twitter is that advertisers are pulling out.

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.

What is 'coombait'?

What we used to call softcore pornography

Porn adjacent material. Technically SFW usually but not the kind of thing you want your coworkers seeing you look at.

And I don’t understand why that is the first thing that comes up on my Facebook feed when I scroll past reels.

I usually watch and like comedians when I am mindlessly scrolling.

Pictures of your female friends at the beach.

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 think that happens because females tend to use social media more, or out of your social graph females are the ones who do. Im a straight partnered male and i dont get coombait because i dont find the content interesting and very quickly i get cute pets and science stuff and half of the suggested people are other male friends

That's possible, yeah.

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.

I discovered I didn't have to take anything you've written seriously when you used the term "coombait."

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