Threads and the social/communications map | Hacker News Reader

Threads and the social/communications map

stratechery.com

73 pointsfeross43 comments

Twitter doesn’t default to the “For you” tab. It remembers which one you spend most time on (I think Elon tweeted this at one point). I use chrono exclusively and it doesn’t default to the algo feed when I open the app.

It does default to “For you” when I change between accounts in the same app.

At the very least, Twitter has an A/B test going on iOS which switches you back to the For You tab aggressively. It's as aggressive as switching to another app like email for less than a minute and you'll see a jarring switch as the app shifts back to For You tab.

It used to be that way, like last year. It's not any more.

It's like this right now on my phone.

they fired the guy who was supposed to stop the A/B test

This is probably boosting metrics so removing it would put them in the sights of management whether it's intentional, or not.

It remembers what mode you choose. But when they changes something it reverts you to "For you".

I think this entire article has missed the point.

For all the blather about enabling creatives, the fact is that the moment one of those creatives "gets political" (as determined by Threads, however they want, with no human appeal), their content will become effectively invisible [0].

Since a huge amount of creativity revolves around political themes - inequality, police brutality, racism, etc - this means that sooner or later creatives will start realizing that Zuck has Zuckerberged them once again.

And it's not just creatives. A large portion of science is inherently political - as we've seen demonstrated amply in the last few years. Threads can say - "hey, we were open from the start that this is a safe space, a conflict free zone - so please remove your political science which shows that oligarchs are burning the planet, and never reach our sheltered normies again".

Even (especially?) education is political. Will teachers get shadowbanned for pointing out they can't afford pencils for their class? Or for asking to be able to teach evolution in the South? That's up to Threads, and it's being spun as a good thing that the place will be "less toxic".

Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies, too-big to fail pharma giants and banks, KKK-funding beer companies and anti-abortion chicken sandwich shops will be heavily advertising to these hundreds of millions of Threaders. That's not political though; because money.

Any meta-Threads about this can be deemed as 'political', and thus made invisible.

I think this is a giant brainwashing machine; even worse than Facebook. And it won't make people smarter, or give people more time to engage in politics offline; it'll just make reaching any anti-corporate tipping point that much harder.

0 - https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...

I dunno, you're posting on a forum that actively tries to avoid particular kinds of politics, and 1) the majority seems to like it, and 2) it doesn't mean that important issues aren't aired out here.

There's a flip side to your argument as well, that too much politics can be bad for you.[0] I don't think the solve for that is "binge on zuckerberg-approved sugar instead", but it certainly is an elephant in the room.

But yeah, it'll come down to how things are moderated. Really though, it'll only be a problem if Threads becomes dominant enough to suck the oxygen out of other rooms. There is not currently a shortage of places online to freely talk about anything you've mentioned.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...

Not OP but I sorta disagree that this forum actively tries to avoid politics.

As the person above mentioned, politics are ingrained in society, science, art, etc. This site does not censor based on that and often has in-depth discussions around the politics of a science or society.

This site and it's moderation is also different on a wholesale level from a meta product and real moderators and users calling out something for being "overly political" is inherently different from how a meta backed service would.

We've already seen how resistant meta is to remove far-right extremist groups, as angry boomers are their bread and butter. I can see Threads optimize for certain politics that get bottom of the barrel engagement akin to various "Heritage not Hate" facebook groups that are absolutely about hate.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

From the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't get submitted because we know what the rules are, and even more stuff that gets flagged pretty quickly if it's a hot-button topic. And yet, like you're saying, good conversations around political topics does occur.

Yes, the moderation here is different than what Meta can do at scale. That's why I said what I said in my reply - it'll come down to how what kinds of moderation decisions are made.

There's nothing inherently wrong with someone wanting to start a social network with a idea of the kind of content it wants to host; it's only a problem if it monopolizes the discourse and starts to wield that power to thumb the scales.

This forum is pretty good at avoiding political battles. There's plenty of political discourse, however, and it can definitely get pretty heated at times (but not nearly as bad as twitter).

> ...their content will become effectively invisible [0]

That link you cited says they won't "discourage or down-rank news or politics." It's the exact opposite of what you said it said.

They might change their mind, of course, but it's always possible companies will change their mind.

Semantics.

If you 'encourage' everything that isn't news and politics, with an unaccountable algorithm, that's precisely the same effect as simply down-ranking news and politics.

> it's always possible companies will change their mind.

It is, and this particularly company has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt. And, from what I've heard, Threads is already full of vacuous celeb and sports content (while riddled with megacorp ads).

"the fact is that the moment one of those creatives "gets political" (as determined by Threads, however they want, with no human appeal), their content will become effectively invisible [0]"

Your citation doesn't support your claim. It actually contradicts it.

Some users -- particularly those in the news/politics sphere -- were clamouring for more of a news / politics focus. Instagram's head declared that it is not their focus. He went on to specifically note that they weren't going to suppress or discourage those topics, they just wouldn't exaggerate or push it, as is the norm.

Because let's be real -- Twitter, Facebook et al push news/politics, particularly news that angers you, because it drives engagement. Many of the major social media news/politics figures were essentially created by these algorithms essentially trying to manufacture engagement, with millions of people spraying spittle and laying trillions of words of noise to zero useful effect on the planet. If Threads stays clear of that, more power to them! In reality eventually someone is going to realize they'll get more ad revenue if they push adversarial content on users, but hopefully it is delayed for a while.

And FWIW, there sure are a lot of "creatives" giving political commentary on Threads...they are appearing in loads on my feed.

I think there is a place for two text based networks, and Zuck has correctly identified the missing one:

1. There's plenty of people (or just moodswings of the same person) who don't want to see political content at a certain time. Remember how everyone loves tiktok because it has super interesting, non political content? That's what threads wants to be with text

2. People do want to keep up with political affairs, and that's also very potent, but can be depressing and overwhelming.

1 is threads, 2 is twitter.

I don't think you can have both 1 and 2 in the same app. Because I know when I want to see politics and when I don't, that's not something an app can predict.

So both twitter and threads can coexist. But we know twitter maxes out at around 200-250m users. That's the market for a politics social network. I think threads is potentially bigger.

But it won't destroy twitter. It will just coexist, in a different market segment.

I feel sad for users of both those apps. I would rather shout in the streets

But twitter isn't good for 2 anymore since political conversations are now dominated by bluechecks with extreme internet-poisoning.

It's like if you went to a bar and the host let people rent megaphones for $10. Only the worst people at the bar even want a megaphone.

The old owner gave megaphones to VIPs, and banned the worst people from entering. Now they've all got rented megaphones.

I would love to use an app where tiresome, needlessly-outraged perspectives are less prevalent.

> A large portion of science is inherently political

Political: "science which shows that oligarchs are burning the planet"

Non-Political: "science which shows that humanity is releasing XXX tonnes of CO2 per year, which has increased atmospheric CO2 by YYY PPM, which has raised global average temeperatures by ZZZ degrees and is predicted to have effects A, B, and C by the year 2100."

Sure some people will choose to have outraged political responses to the latter, but that can be discouraged just as well as "oligarchs are burning the planet".

> the fact is that the moment one of those creatives "gets political" (as determined by Threads, however they want, with no human appeal), their content will become effectively invisible

This is good for long-term engagement. If someone posts a lot of great content interspersed with occasional outraged political diatribes, then silently downranking the latter will keep their subscribers engaged who only wanted to see the former.

> The second change is the TikTok-ization I noted above: my new vertical axis is user-generated content, by which I mean content across the network, versus network-generated content, by which I mean content from the people you choose to follow.

Maybe I'm a bit slow this morning, but I'm not following this. The time-based/algo-based distinction I get, but...user content is network content and network content is users you follow? All content is user-generated, right? Blogging is on the "content across the network" side, but I only get content from blogs I choose to follow, right?

Agreed, I also found this confusing.

My take on this was user generated content = content generated by people you follow vs network generated content = content generated by people that you don't follow that the network recommends to you.

There's a huge difference between TikTok's FYP and Following Page and Friends page. While content is all user generated, I expect something different from each of these three modes.

Same, but I think you got it backwards, at least based on their description.

User-generated content = content generated by all users (i.e., users you follow and users you don't)

Network-generated content = content generated by users in your network (i.e., users you follow)

Makes sense. I think my framing would make sense if it said platform-generated content. Network per your framing makes more sense.

The description by the author makes it confusing with "network" being used in both terms; definition of one and the term itself in the other.

Yeah had the same issue as above but this does help clear it up

It's just a poor description. Maybe a better way to frame this is user control of content served, from a black box based on your data (Tiktok) to fully deterministic by user action (RSS). This largely runs parallel to the time vs algo based axis though.

They are the same content, but they’re not the same product at all.

You could say that all TikTok does is repackage content for wider distribution across the app in a more aggressive way than social apps had before.

> Twitter’s best defense against Threads may be to retreat to that lower left corner: focus on what is happening now, from people you chose to follow. The problem, though, is that while this might win the battle against Threads, it means that Musk will have lost the war when it comes to ever making a return on his $44 billion.

This hits the Jackpot, I'm desperate to get off Twitter, but nobody gets it right, and Elon is trying his best to ruin it with mindless crap in the for you page.

The thing is, Twitter already solved this, the old algorithm was actually pretty good! It balanced between speed and showing me what I missed, that is till Elon messed it up.

I was very optimistic about threads but it turned out to just be text Instagram, which is not at all what I want from an actually relevant platform.

> Ultimately, though, I think they may be disappointed: Meta is about algorithms and scale, and I would bet that Threads will leave real time reactions, news, and pitched battles to Twitter; Musk’s most important decision may be accepting that that is enough, because it’s all he’s going to get.

Absolutely, but I doubt Elon would stop trying to run Twitter to the ground to get every last cent out of it, and unfortunately it seems nobody is willing to replicate the Twitter experience.

Mastodon is too hard for normal users, bluesky is a glorified tech demo and threads is pushing its users towards memes and influencers asking you what you ate today, completely missing what made Twitter special, culture relevance and speed.

I don't want to see a threads from two days ago about a ground prix that already ended, or a random celebrity selfie, I want to see the latest news in sports, tech, open source and reactions from people in those communities, a good example is the current RHEL drama and all the news coming from Oracle, SUSE and others, it's all on Twitter, and unfortunately threads doesn't seem interested in changing that.

>“Culturally relevant” is the one game that Twitter has won, far more than Facebook, and arguably more than Instagram

i agree with this, but i don't think it fits nicely into the author's map of social networks. twitter is "bottom left", but their main threat for cultural dominance is tiktok, which is firmly "top right". being culturally relevant doesn't seem to have any relation to where a service falls on their map.

Twitter is “culturally relevant” in that events (actually most often “pseudo-events” as defined by Daniel Boorstein [1]) on Twitter frequently get amplified in other media.

One example is the time somebody make a fake Eli Lilly account, tweeted “insulin is now free” and it is alleged this caused a temporary drop in Eli Lilly stock. A similar example is that time J.K. Rowling got dogpiled by gender activists.

The key thing is that the reification in the media has a larger impact than the actual tweets which are viewed by far fewer people over a much shorter time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event

The dual spidey meme is cool and is correct if you understand social networks in terms of functionality and not what matters - audience. Functionality is similar although Threads does have more of a sterile approach to product branding. So yes spidey meme works if that’s your lens. But the audiences are VERY different. Those that succeed in text-based microblog platforms have succeeded on and migrated to Twitter. That audience is dramatically different to the Instagram audience which is look-at-me visual types. Couldn’t be further apart. Ben and Zuck are looking in the wrong direction when making the spidey meme comparison. This is the 2023 equivalent of Eric Schmidt saying that Twitter is just email. It’s the audience, stupid.

https://playtext.app/doc/cljyaz7y30000jo0f8d4nd4nn

Amidst beauty, shadows may loom, Zucc's empire, where darkness consumes. But we navigate, in this digital spree, Words set minds free, embracing connectivity.

That was beautiful

The last line, was meant to rhyme, and said:

But we navigate, in this digital spree, Words set minds free, embracing connectivity. A poem authored by ChatGPT.

It's interesting to look at the app privacy compared to the Twitter app privacy in the App Store. It looks like Threads just just getting everything and Twitter is at least trying to limit access.

Twitter

- Data Used to Track You: Purchases, Contact info, Browsing History, Usage Data, Location, User Content, identifier

- Data Linked to You: Purchases, Contact Info, User Content, Browsing History, Usage Data, Location, Contacts, Search History, Identifiers, Diagnostics

- Data Not Linked to You: Contact Info, User Content, Other Data

Threads

- Data Linked to You: Health & Fitness, Financial Info, Contact Info, User Content, Browsing History, Usage Data, Diagnostics, Purchases, Location, Contacts, Search History, Identifiers, Sensitive Info, Other Data

Twitter has a functional website though, and you can do a lot more to block trackers there.

I would rather read this 2400 times than see a thread on threads

Internet words set minds free

To connect and create

And forge new joint identity

Built on love or hate.

Frightened hominids we are,

Succumbing easily to the latter

While false tech prophets from afar

Reap the fruit of our fervent chatter.

- Written by flesh and blood

Reply on news.ycombinator.com