Also earthquakes. Living in the California, I'm actually very impressed with Twitter's trending searches. I can always find few people tweeting about earthquake within 10seconds of an earthquake.
They are interested in breaking news, sports etc. They are just trying to avoid the platform turning into the polarising mess that Twitter is right now. And so they've been trying to position the app as more holistic than just politics and news.
Hashtags and trending searches are next on their roadmap. And I suspect that there is some technical work on their part to upgrade the underlying Instagram platform to support more real-time updates to the feed. Once that happens news will inevitably become a bigger part of Threads.
Threads is contributing a huge amount of behavioural data to Instagram ad profiles so it may never need to run ads in order to provide significant value to the company. That's going to place X at a disadvantage over the long term.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-el...
However, every time I open the app it's basically a ghost town. I personally don't know anyone using it, so I just see a bunch of brand and celebrity posts.
Threads feels more like a platform for brands than for regular people.
And they have the cash to keep Threads going for decades whereas X is in a financial hole. Linda is meeting with creditors [1] who are freaking out over the drop in valuation and she doesn't even know whether the company plans to be advertising or subscription driven.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/474b30e9-a726-4571-8475-9adabbbc8...
Meta, the company currently named after their attempted pivot to a VR social network that utterly bombed? I'll certainly grant that they built one social network, but it is less obvious to me that they can repeat it on command.
Not really. Zuckerburg got lucky once, the rest was purchased.
Like him or hate him, Zuckerberg’s strategies have been great for his company. I don’t know about his VR business, but he’s like a Midas king when it comes to social media. Everything social media related he’s touched has turned into gold. Instagram and WhatsApp were already kind of big, but they’re were not the ubiquitous behemoths they are today.
Threads could be his first big fail though.
The whole Oculus mess does seem to indicate he doesn't have a Midas touch. And let's not forget the metaverse, which isn't going at all well.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Workplace, Threads.
The latter has reached 130m+ users after all.
I'd rather think that Facebook had been consistently successful in catering its cohort. That targeted cohort might just have too little overlap with users in market for Twitter/Mastodon/Threads, but as far as Facebook/Instagram(post-acquisition) are concerned the users seem satisfied with Meta-run social media to me.
And if building a hundred million user social network in such a rapid timeframe isn't a success not sure what is.
Instagram had 30 million users at the time of acquisition. Scaling that to billions of users is not trivial nor is it inevitable.
From what I can tell, this is the way Instagram recommendations treat cold start users. It was only when I started liking stuff that they went away.
Google's getting wiser tho, I went from getting insta thirst ads to getting anime weaboo girl ads, to getting half naked dragon girl ads, until finally I recently got advertised some gay furry stuff. Nice.
That said, chatgpt is pretty decent at role playing, if you know how to trick it into it (still actually not that hard). It's an interesting topic though; some people are resistant to playing that sort of "game" with it, even though those people are fine with in-game romances such as those in Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate.
I have never posted, liked a post, and follow family exclusively. I keep clicking the "not interested" option but it hasn't changed anything.
It was strange but comforting to know Meta doesn't have shit on me.
I had the opposite experience. I never had this problem either, until all the firings happened.
After that, either someone wasn't looking after the thirst traps, or they actively changed the throttle of them so they kept appearing.
That was about a month before I left that cess pit.
In fact, I used to be very surprised to read that Twitter had been previously widely used for porn adverts. I was kind of deluded into not even thinking about it. But scratch the surface and it was there. But it never appeared in my daily use.
Prior to the takeover I had been oblivious to it. After the takeover, the surface was scratched and what had previously been "underground" really made itself known in my twitter feed.
That isn't what made me leave the platform, but just my observation at the time.
Ultimately it is because I wasn’t using Instagram actively enough so the algorithm defaulted to Late 20s Male profiling.
Spend 2-5 minutes selecting the posts you don’t want to see and training the algorithm.
Instagram: Press and hold on items on the search tab and select “not interested”. To give it your actual interests, search for a few things like Golf, Cars, etc.
Threads: Select the three dots on posts and choose “Hide”. Same as Instagram, search for a few generic topics you prefer.
Massively better results as soon as the next day.
I want threads to work so badly compared to Twitter that I’ve happily just written a guide to train Metas algorithm. That’s how badly Twitter has dropped the ball.
What if that is the actual state of the country and Twitter is just reflecting it?
It's not hard to see how this is going to drive people into deeply divided groups. You immediately end up with an in-group and an out-group, both with good reason to avoid the other. And then in this division, both groups characterization of the other drifts further and further from reality, further cementing such divisions. This site [1] demonstrating the scale of the perception gap among various groups is quite telling. I don't think it was like this, at all, not that long ago.
I locate this moment quite precisely. It was when either Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist's live TV question about 'the reality' in Iraq II, and said "We control reality". That was when narrative paradigm took a dark turn in the West and I see the PNAC as taking internal psyops to a whole new, overt level.
All politicians _know_ this, but you never _say it_ !!
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company publicly burned the precious veneer of good faith.
They didn't just want to construct the Iraq War, they needed to rub our noses in the blatant cheek of it.
That was the birth of "post truth" for me.
After that it naturally followed that every organisation, business, or individual could legitimately construct their own "narrative reality" through social media or whatever, without any regard for facts.
If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.
Back to modern times, I don't think it's hyperbolic to see secessionary momentum following the election next year, regardless of who wins, as an at least reasonably possible scenario. And if it does, then we're 9/10ths of the way there. And it's not even entirely clear what happened. It's just like things divided hard in an incredibly brief period of time.
We're so used to the fast pace of modern science that we forget cultural evolution sometimes takes hundreds of years. What if we are 500 years before enough Internet philosophers have taught us how to behave online?
A huge amount has been written and spoken about this.
They probably don't use the Internet.
You know how much I post about how I don't use Facebook on Facebook? Zero.
You know how many people who don't use Facebook someone on Facebook would believe exist? Zero.
If you really want to find people who don't do a thing... go find them.
As a starting place, Wyoming has whole swaths of folks who don't use email.
I really don't think the majority of folks are going to quit social media even if every day the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, whoever put out news stories on how horrendous it is.
The real difference between social media and real life is that you can get punched in the face for being an asshat, and in general we have a lot of brain power dedicated to making sure we fit into our tribal group and physical context.
Mind you, I did not say the Internet is an absolute negative, but in my view, the enormous benefit of instantaneous communication is negated by the impossibility of measured discourse with more than two dozen strangers.
Doesn't matter how much we've progressed society, women's rights, gay right's etc - apparently the rule of law is still "yeah, well, I can punch you in the face!" and so long as the puncher fits into societal norms, everyone will clap and cheer!
Damn we really do just form layers upon layers of tribes, and boy do we still have a lust for tribal warfare.
This is why people cannot have intelligent discourse on the Internet. Instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and space to elaborate my case, you point to me and say "look at this troglodyte, everybody," and find a way to use the causes and ideologies you believe in (women and gay rights, which have nothing to do with my argument) as a weapon to demonize me and my words.
If you do not see that as terrifying and anti-intellectual, you have been spending too much time on the Internet, because I truly believe that if we were sat in front of each other we would find we are of the same general opinion and would enjoy a pleasant conversation.
Honestly, this is quite tiring, so I have no interest in engaging further. You won. Have a good day.
While I enjoy HN immensely and have been participating without major issues for a decade, it would be hard for me to say even this place is the gold standard of communication. The upvote system, for example, is the major contributor to echo chamber hive mind mob thinking.
1. Focus on engagement means a focus on rage inducing, soundbite esque content that provokes anger rather than a reasonable conversation.
2. Algorithmic timelines mean content is often personalised to the user, potentially either leading to an echo chamber or a fight (by showing content from people the user fundamentally disagrees with)
3. Moderation is virtually nonexistent, outsourced to third world support teams or applied unevenly/unfairly, both encouraging bad behaviour and making those affected think the system is against them.
4. Short character limits and mobile focused designs encourage snarky responses and short putdowns over more thoughtful responses.
5. The focus on reply times and posting speed in how comments are shown encourages responding based on the title alone (on sites like Reddit especially)
6. Upvote/downvote system encourages people to see content as good or bad and nothing else, with the definitions of such being heavily based on whether the content agrees with their personal biases.
And many, many other factors. Most social media sites and services are designed to make people act as unreasonably as possible.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
There was maybe a lull during the early-Facebook era, as more grandparents adopted the platform while retaining their manners and social decency.
And then they too realized they could post whatever they wanted about "The {Noun}s" without consequence.
And now we're here again.
There's a lot to be said for talking to someone's face and having to deal with the consequences of your words directly.
Have people that believe this stupid bullshit ever thought more than a couple of seconds about it? What are those folks going to do later? Invade the pentagon?
Yes, the USA has become a laughable banana republic with almost Soviet amounts of propaganda. But insurrections don’t work like that. Can’t you fucking see the propaganda?
It wasn’t the insurgents who would have taken control of the government. It was the man driving them to destruction who would have taken advantage of the chaos to stay in power.
The capitol riot thing was a stalling tactic. The ones trying to take over the government were NOT the people pooping on Nancy Pelosi's desk. We have their notes, talking about how they we submitting false electors. We know Pence called up a friend to ask whether he could come up with a legal theory to justify the process. He only didn't go through with it because he thought the plotters would kill him. A significant portion of the Republican party STILL voted to not confirm Biden as president after it happened.
They're right to do this too. I enjoyed Threads drama free for a few days. The first time I saw a post from a journalist - it was drama. Complaining about how important news is and how it's morally wrong of Meta to not be prioritising it. So obviously self-serving too.
Huh? That's a strange requirement. Somehow every social media platform eventually devolves into having news, meme pages and other faceless inhuman entities you seemingly can't escape.
I, for one, desperately want the opposite — a platform where organizations of any kind are not welcome. Only people and their personal accounts. The fediverse is kinda like that. Yes, BBC does have their own Mastodon server, but they don't have many followers and there are no algorithms to force-feed you out-of-network content.
(Graze for Mastodon is another useful extension)
Secondly, it feels like in a federate network of any type that growing the network should be top priority, even over the user experience.
Put another way, it seems to me as a newbie that Mastodon's growth effort itself has been federated, which is probably not ideal for the growth necessary to really challenge the walled gardens.
The service itself is improving slowly and quite conservatively which is a really nice change of pace from the warp speed enshittification I have been used to for years now. On the other hand, there is also a wide range of high-quality third apps for it which Twitter now completely lacks (and basically every other walled garden platform, e.g. Reddit was the latest casualty) of you need a different experience.
So, politicians and political meme accounts?
How would you even know if a personal account wasn't being managed by an organization?
You can't block politics on these sites in any case. People love drama, it adds 'stickiness' to the app.
Without any form of recommendation system, you will have to find and follow these accounts yourself. Most people wouldn't do that without being constantly nudged by algorithms. So, anything you'll see in your feed would come from people you intentionally follow intentionally reposting things. For a piece of content created by someone way outside of your bubble to become viral in this kind of setup, it has to be really damn good.
There's so many self-indulgent posts from IG influencers earlier on it becomes terrible experience to doom scroll. By the time they released a separate "Following" tab, people have lost their interest in using it.
And as usual Meta doesn't give a f about iPads, so threads (like instagram) looks like crap running on it.
I think that's a pretty disingenuous way of putting it. Meta and Google were told that by law they would need to pay money to /link/ to news content. Everyone else pays Meta and Google to run ads or does SEO, and now Meta has to pay the people they're linking to (but only if its news). It's completely back-asswords and I support their protest.
"Hey McDonalds, when this one group orders a cheeseburger you have to give them money instead of them paying you"
"Okay, we won't serve those people cheeseburgers."
Same situation, just as ridiculous.