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Comment by synetic | Hacker News Reader

It’s an unusable app. I’ve followed about 5 people. On the app there is no way for me to see a list of the people I’ve followed. There’s no way to get a list that contains only the threads started by people I follow. Threads is a terrible implementation. It’s embarrassingly bad.

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I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it embarrassing… But I’m certainly looking forward to being able to see only my friends’ threads. (And ads, I’m sure). Until then I’m just waiting, I dislike wading through random peoples’ posts.

At that point, is it the same as Facebook?

Zuck is "very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected."

I wouldn't count it out.

I’m not counting it out. Lots of people want an alternative to Twitter since Musk has alienated a significant percentage of users. The Threads app though sucks really bad. It is a very bad implementation and it’s embarrassing that Facebook launched such a bad app.

It doesn't matter though. Copying the features of incumbents has always been FB's MO. They will eventually compete or even outrace Twitter in due time, as much as I do not like to see that.

I argue "buying out the competition" has always been FB's MO.

They are not even remotely close to having the technological foundation of Twitter and FBs internal incentive structure fortifies short-term thinking.

Well, since technically it's a Twitter clone from top to bottom with no new ideas, it deserves to be bad.

They were also very optimistic about Horizon Worlds.

from day one you can see the people you've followed. Just go to your profile and click "following".

As for the general implementation, I'm with you on the problems of lacking a feed with only posts from those you follow. But according to the Threads team, this was a minimally-viable-product and features like that are coming soon.

Other than that, it's been very smooth in my experience. And much less full of crap that Twitter. Though that's likely due to it being brand new.

I just checked it out. I’m on the iPad. I clicked on the icon for my profile. It shows a grayed out text that says “0 followers”. There is no link for a list of people I’m following and there is no display of who I’m following. After a while of poking around I see that if I click on “0 followers” - and it is not obvious at all that this is a link - I get taken to a page that shows that I have zero followers. There is a tab that says “Following”. I click on it and it shows who I’m following.

This is a shitty app. It is user hostile.

It’s way more crappy than Twitter. I’ve blocked around 100 people and I still get dumb influencers on my feed. Clearly I have no desire to see what Selena Gomez or any other similar person is doing.

Sounds like it might be working as expected - weeding out the unprofitable users by pushing marketing hard and finding out who will put up with it

It’s not working well if they already have lost half their daily users. Did you read the article?

The standard play for new entrants is to make a great experience and then slowly make it suck more by injecting intrusive ads into the experience. If Facebook’s strategy is as you seem to suggest, namely make it suck to begin with, then Threads will likely fail.

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