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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

If you listen to Zuckerberg's interview with Alex Heath it's clear what they meant.

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.

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I like the UI design of Threads and I’m trying to enjoy the app, but it keeps flooding my feed with desperate, attention-seeking women in suggestive clothing and positions. I never have this problem on X.

I don‘t use Instagram often, but I recently met a girl irl who wanted to connect. I open the search in the app and it instantly recommends exclusively girls showing off their bodies, even though I only follow friends otherwise. It was quite embarrassing.

Then you probably want mastodon. Chronological feeds are the only option there!

Stop looking at thirsty girls on the gram then. In my experience it shows you more of what you look at.

It's showing me a lot of luxury handbag influencers that obviously target a very different demographic. I'm absolutely sure I never looked for anything like that (I follow mostly science/scientist accounts and comics and I'm male). I also keep getting ads for commercial pilot insurance and I'm definitely not in that demographic either. Instagram's recommendation model seems to work well if you fit a common categorization well (women interested in luxury handbags perhaps), and utterly break down when you don't. I'm a software engineer, I don't need specialty carts to move Boeing aircraft engines.

No, it just shows what your "demographic" mostly wants. And unfortunately for me as a gay man, the average straight man thirsts after scantily clad chicks on insta etc, even if they have to demean and debase themselves for a crumb of attention.

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.

Talk to us about these half naked dragon girls...

Ahaha, well I'm pretty sure it was for some heavily monetised crapware with art that you can pretty much find on e6 anyways.

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.

As a very casual Instagram user, I had a similar experience to the parent comment (not so much now).

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.

Thirstbait is the default for these companies. I don't access YouTube with any Google cookies so their profiling is suppressed. They periodically load up their front page with T&A content despite never having a personal history of clicking on such content.

Confirmed. I tried tiktok but was flooded with 3/4 naked teenage girls before I could do anything on the platform. It's like they ignored my onboarding preferences completely and just said here...she so thirsty.

Instagram thought I was a black women for the longest time, and was serving me content geared toward black women.

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.

This was happening to me too (Instagram but same thing); it’s pretty easy to fix.

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.

Same here. The algorithm seems to be really bad at recommending relevant content on the 'for you' style timeline, and barely seems to take my likes and follows into account at all...

You mean, Twitter.

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.

I didn’t notice any difference until the last month or so, and now it’s not ordinary users posting thirst traps, but obvious bots “looking for love” liking and retweeting my posts seconds after I post them. It’s a different problem than Instagram, but it’s still pretty bizarre considering Musk’s complaints that pre-acquisition Twitter had too many bots.

Facebook is flooded with these as well. They have gotten really good at making the profiles look organic.

This sounds all true, but on Twitter - I never had the issue before so it seems more than a coincedence.

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.

Are you complaining? Edit /s

> They are just trying to avoid the platform turning into the polarising mess that Twitter is right now.

What if that is the actual state of the country and Twitter is just reflecting it?

The real world is a lot saner, and beautiful

I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility. We are all trying to make the social media experiment work and I am horrified by its result. The more we tweak and add to it (upvotes, user moderators, likes, retweets, the Algorithm), the worse it gets.

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?

> I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility.

A huge amount has been written and spoken about this.

Apparently, not enough, or not forceful enough for a contingent of people to decide to quit the Internet for good. Where are the modern day anti-Internet luddites? Talking about it on a blog or, worse, posting about it on Twitter doesn't count, sorry.

> Where are the modern day anti-Internet luddites?

They probably don't use the Internet.

Exactly.

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.

So that's the rub, the people who realize it is horrible actually quit on it. Lots of people talk about getting of social media, but very few actually delete all of their accounts. I've removed every social account I have around four years ago. I still have a HN account, but that's about it. I talk to my family and friends about how dangerous I think social media is to our society if the topic comes up, but frankly not many people want to hear it. If I really pressed, I'd end up being "that guy" who talks too much about any topic.

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.

My compromise is I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but not the apps, so I have to use a browser on my phone to look at them. This means I can still see content, but no notifications and the friction is high. I'd rather go on Youtube and see what people I subscribe to are making videos about.

The Internet as a infrastructure, I think it's probably a huge net positive. Social networks on the other hand, particularly Twitter and Facebook, I would agree we would be better off without them right now.

The problem Twitter and Facebook have is size. Call it an unproven conjecture, but any network that reaches quasi-global sizes becomes a cesspool of scum and villainy, and it scales exponentially with number of users. Newer generations are discovering that niche, small communities are better, in the face of the idea of an Inter-Net.

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.

Well it's not just scale. It's also a series of business decisions that hurt civility in various ways:

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.

Social networks as a concept are also a huge net positive, in my view. Corporate leeches trying to monetize everything about human interaction, we're better off without. Which does include Facebook and increasingly includes Xitter.

I disagree. While corporate interests make social networks worse, regular people are tend to be major asshats on any social network, a concept that was already known in the late 90s and today it is widespread, and crosses any cultural, economical and contextual reason. It is safe to say humans on the internet eventually behave like asshats.

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.

>you can get punched in the face for being an asshat So you believe this is right, then? I think that's literally the biggest problem with our species; it all comes down to violence, in the end.

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.

Ugh.. this is exactly the problem. There are nuances to my argument that your knee jerk reaction just conveniently ignores, and claims that I want violence for any degree of disagreement. "And everybody will clap and cheer!" Seriously?

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.

With the length of your response, you could have actually elaborated your point further, perhaps without the drama (or with it, both is still good. Real emotion is the spicy magic that separates us from LLMs).

It was a pretty settled point two decades ago.

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.

The gig reddits are heaped full of people trying to divine the algorithms.

Culture learns by experience.

Capitol cops might disagree... This country has had a recent armed insurrection and people convicted of seditious conspiracy. Meanwhile the people who organized it see themselves as the victims of weaponized law enforcement and call for violence against law enforcement institutions such as judges, attorney generals, etc. It's not the entire real world, but you've got to admit it isn't just a Twitter bubble that's crazy polarized.

Yeah, a bunch of poor ignorant rednecks invading the capitol was almost an armed insurrection that almost took the power in the most powerful police state of the world.

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?

Had they destroyed the ballots, had they killed Pence, we would have been in uncharted legal and constitutional territory.

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.

Just because the insurrection could have been crushed at any moment doesn’t change what it was.

>But insurrections don’t work like that

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.

Yeah we would've just replaced all the dead senators with football players and been fine

Our bubbles are like that. The real world is a real damn mess.

I'd wager it's still better than the cyber world

You don't go outside too much, don't you?

The real world might be tragic, violent, or worse. But, inhumane conduct on the "metaverse" is much more normalized and common than in the relative considerate society I live in. I understand the bias here. It might be reason behind this comment. Nevertheless, it's real.

And what if Twitter is partly causing it (along with other media).

You can also go the other way. There's always going to be the possibility of a chicken/egg type question, but it seems clear that a lot of the insanity and division started to happen about the time people started trying to control (and started caring so much about) what other people say and think. It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this.

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.

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/

> It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this.

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.

On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.

An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed.

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.

I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?

Slavery was highly contentious, at all levels, from day 0 of the United States. That's where Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal." line came from. In the original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy diatribe against slavery, but it was removed in the final draft - presumably under pressure from slave interests. That conflict, over such a meaningful issue, still took near to 100 years to collapse into the Civil War.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

It's both, in a feedback loop from hell.

>> 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.

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.

The irony, people whine when shown rage bait, people whine when not shown rage bait.

They want to avoid recreating the polarising mess that is Twitter... by copying Twitter wholesale?

I don't think people at Meta think that "polarizing" is bad, is an easy way to drive engagement

It’s at least a plausible market opportunity—a way to differentiate themselves from Twitter and capitalize on the people who are repulsed by Twitter’s rage peddling (although the rage peddling cooled down a bit post-acquisition, especially with Community Notes, but platform culture doesn’t change overnight even if the algos and features improve slightly).

I think polarization is something that changes between societies, I now live in a society that is polarized by the politicians themselves and for sure you see a lot of interactions in posts about politics.

Threads is dead at this point realistically

Not according to Zuckerberg [1]. He was happy with DAU numbers and planned to commit to the app long-term.

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...

But this is standard CEO-speak. He will remain completely happy with the app, committed to it going forward, and a personal power-user of it. Right up until the moment it's abandoned completely with no warning.

Instagram is also embedding Threads posts directly, with a link to open them in the app. I've gotten a few prompts while using Instagram to remind me to open Threads.

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.

Almost everyone I know is using Bluesky now. I’ve yet to see anyone using threads.

Must be nice to live in a bubble where Bluesky isn't gated behind a waitlist and your entire circle can move wholesale with ease.

Waitlist is a distraction. Ask for a code from core("terminally online") Twitter users. I got mine on Nostr from someone not a furry. Perhaps you can ask around in the Fediverse.

I've never seen a anything from Bsky cross-posted on Twitter, IG, or Reddit. I don't think it's just people like me that won't want to hunt for an invite to something I can't even preview.

It's... Twitter pre-firehose at this moment. Lunch pics and random ideas, not an endless buzz stream. So not much to crosspost out.

Access to invite codes is abundant in the furry community. Can just ask anyone you know for one.

Network effects. Do you think Facebook would have ever taken off back in the 2000s if everyone had to get a code from a furry to join?

From memory Facebook was gatekept behind needing to be a university student.

From 2004-2007. It's been a public square for the vast majority of its existence.

Not sure where this optimism comes from, but alright.

Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

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...

> Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

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.

> Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

Not really. Zuckerburg got lucky once, the rest was purchased.

You have to have a talent for that though. How many companies have made terrible purchases?

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.

Beware survivor bias. How many acquisitions has Facebook/Meta made? (answer: a lot). How many are social behemoths? (answer: 2). We don't know how many he tried to make successful and failed at, because we don't hear of them, or don't remember them.

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.

They have 5 successful social platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Workplace, Threads.

The latter has reached 130m+ users after all.

Never heard of Workplace before (unless that's the metaverse thing, in which case it's clearly not successful). And "threads is successful" is dubious: the key point of the article is that it isn't.

Workplace is private Facebook for large orgs. So just Facebook. Doesn't seem like a total flop, though.

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.

Large orgs aren't using FB enterprise offering, they're on Teams or Slack.

Workplace is the market leading enterprise social network.

And if building a hundred million user social network in such a rapid timeframe isn't a success not sure what is.

yeah, exactly. We're not sure this is success.

>the rest was purchased

Instagram had 30 million users at the time of acquisition. Scaling that to billions of users is not trivial nor is it inevitable.

WhatsApp, another Meta purchase, begs to differ.

also it might be enough now if they dominate some small niches at start and grow from there. Instagram started with mood pictures about coffee, tiktok was first about dancing videos etc. Zuckberg knows actual numbers and we don't.

According to Zuck their "metaverse" is not dead neither, but I guess it's filled of legless people wandering around aimlessly

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