I've been super impressed with the technology part of the Threads launch. I can't wait to read more about it in the future.
I do wonder though if we will look back on this period in history and regret the economic and cultural incentives which have co-opted so many smart people into the service of ... advertising.
This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.
Yikes. It’s actually exactly capitalism. We spent more money than god on COVID research basically from 0. That research didn’t restrict freedoms. We decided to co-opt capitalism and pump money directly where we needed it. This incentives people to research Covid within the capitalist market. We could do the same for Ebola or Public transportation but we chose not to.
Anything can be whatever if you define your terms in obtuse or unusual ways.
Launder it by burying the questionable definitions a couple layers down from the garbage you’ve set out to “prove”, and you can fool even some smart folks.
Ubiquitous surveillance is what pays most of the VerySmart gathered here.
Advertising is just the part of the market we can talk about in stand ups.
Do you really think that the usefulness of knowledge is limited to trying to sell you stuff?
If so, you’ve never thought about it very deeply.
The Graph API has also fallen apart, with their solution being to close the bug submission tool for most issue types. The "replacement" is a discussion forum where no Facebook employees visit, most posts have zero responses, and no issue tracking whatsoever.
Wasn't Graph API going away because of that whole Cambridge Analyitica scandal?
Whatever they did Twitter folks or not, it was an extremely slick launch. Any Threads people reading this should pat themselves on the back.
On a side note: It was also fun watching Musk fuming that week when the Threads numbers came in. :D
This is excusable in a normal startup MVP, but not when you promote it all over Instagram.
I could see maybe trending topics as possibly a feature that would be nice to have at launch but the others?
The following are my thoughts if I were a PM choosing features.
search - What are you going to search for when the app is brand new? I believe we did have user search as I recall using it so you must be referring to content search.
DMs - Do we know what their anticipated user projections were going to be? I could see this feature being a worthless endeavor vs other things they could have done if the userbase ended up being small.
a web version - These guys are a mobile first company, the large % of users are on mobile, their existing web properties are either in maintenance mode(facebook) or just thin wrappers(instagram). I can see why this wasn't a priority.
non-Instagram account creation - Sounds like either this was a way to bypass overhead in their typical new user generation or they felt one click signup from IG would encourage more active users/reduce issues of bots which may not have been thought out at launch. It would be interesting to learn more about this unclear part of the infra.
Europe - Even for big company launches they typically american first, likely for the same reasons why we dont see big new tech companies ever launched from Europe anymore: too many little issues dealing with all the different countries in the union, issues with complying with various regulations.
half the time my app screen freezes or there's an issue with posts showing. it was good at the start and that's how fb gained users, but at this point people put up with the poor UX because of friction.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.