Meta Plans to Grow Threads by Ramming Its Posts to Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Meta Plans to Grow Threads by Ramming Its Posts to Facebook

gizmodo.com

39 pointsrntn42 comments

Absurd headline. Gizmodo's anti-tech bias is showing pretty clearly here. This makes total sense as a product strategy. Not sure what's so controversial about giving more reach to Threads posts as this already works pretty well for Instagram stories

agreed, no way am I going to bother reading something so clearly biased.

A Thread carousel within the Facebook app will drive a ton of passive views, which in turn will drive "creators" to the Threads app.

Perhaps what the article meant by the carousel has lead to an "insufferable experience" - is that its annoyingly addictive. In my experience as a passive consumer - I do find I pop open the FB app and then somehow get sucked into the reels... which as a user is annoying but probably highly lucrative for Meta.

My take is that this is the secret sauce of Meta - whereas any new social app needs to grow views organically - Meta uniquely can jumpstart a new social app through its ability to drive view counts through carousels on its existing properties.

Like buzz that google attempt at social network that relied on Gmail user base.

The controversial thing is whether this should be a part of anti-trust investigations. :-P

I can't imagine being so far gone that you have no shred of the end user perspective left in your consciousness, and no concept of how getting your feed rammed full of a failed social media platform's posts might be annoying.

That said. Facebook and instagram are both already a lost cause in this regard.

Why wouldn't the world's largest social network leverage their advantage in taking on another product in their industry?

That doesn't seem the right question. I think the main question people are raising is whether they should, not whether they would.

Facebook seems to be of two minds with regard to "social" media. On the one hand, they're forcing awful reels/stories type anti-social content that's largely meant for passive consumption and zero engagement, while on the other hand pushing a new product that encourages participation and engagement and content that lasts more than 24h.

The actual useful social part of Facebook really only needs about 5 minutes per day to keep up with: who has a birthday, who's kid did some cute thing, who is where on vacation, and similar things. They need you to spend hours on Facebook to make money though, and that means adding things to keep you on despite not being what they do well.

I think that's the truly rotten thing about social media. They need you to interact with it in pursuit of their business goals, instead of letting people drive social dynamics themselves. It's less "social" and more "consumption."

By contrast, a private group chat is entirely driven by its participants and the social expectations between them. A private group chat won't say "hey, we recommend you add X, Y, and Z randos!" or try to commodify your social ties.

there's money in both of them

Threads and Facebook were supposed to be differentiated. Tying Threads to IG to FB just sounds like they want to marge it all.

Sounds like Threads is beleaguered.

Isn't Threads just a hedge to be able to EEE Mastodon?

Meta fails to realize that the initial attraction to Instagram was that it is not Facebook and therefore you can foster/curate a completely different vibe and friend group there. Now that it is becoming entwined with FB (and all their excessive moderation, boomers, etc.) people are looking for the next cool thing. Doing the same with Threads will increase eyeballs and numbers but probably not by much and will suffer the same round peg in a square hole mismatch.

Speaking of weird couplings with FB, whatever happened to their dating platform?

Reading this article i just remembered i had a threads account. Opened the app, and sure enough, it’s full of crap.

Not surprising. Threads from Facebook, after all. That fact is what makes using the service unacceptable to me.

Doesn't this introduce a conflict of interest when it comes to ActivityPub? Not that I ever believed they'd really add support.

I've seen them post threads in IG, and it made me go back to threads after abandoning it after 1 day

Oh sht, and people now get to see what their friends posts on a separate social network

Lina Khan smiles and nods while she tents her fingers in front of her.

Why?

Because she has nothing better to do given what a failure all her misadventures have been.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-gendo-pose

As someone living in the EU who wants to use Threads but cannot - as Meta has blocked it here, while they work out GDPR compliance that has not been solved since launch - its amusing to me to read how Meta is planning to do various growth hacks.

My humble suggestion would be to first, perhaps, roll out to the EU? On one hand: sure, we are “only” talking about 450M potential users. On the other: anyone who has friends in this region or an interest in someone based here: well, that person needs to go to Twitter/Mastodon/BlueSky etc.

I am not saying this definitely explains all growth struggles: but surely doesn’t help true, global adoption?

I'm curious if anyone there has explained exactly what the blocker is. Like, why can BlueSky operate there but not Threads? What work are they doing to get launched in the EU?

surely the smart thing to do would have been just to roll the whole thing out without selling anyone's data at all, then implement GDPR-compliant monetisation post hoc?

If you feel like you're being left out on access to Threads, open a Google image search of some of your favorite brand logos - Wendy's, Dr Scholl's, etc. And then imagine some hilarious corporate-culture-friendly conversations that could happen between those brands as written between social media interns.

e.g.

Wendy's - "Boy, my feet are tired from doing Fortnight dances!"

Dr Scholl's reply - "We've got just the products to keep you hitting the griddy for hours! LMBO!"

The remainder of the experience is engagement farming.

Is hilarious to see Facebook flailing on a new social thing. I remember Google's early efforts with Buzz and social things in Reader. Oddly, I actually liked the social in Reader. And then they blew that by trying to redefine what social they had to be in Wave and then Plus. (It was plus, right? Baffling to me that I can't remember the name of a major google product from not that long ago.)

Has Meta created something successful since Facebook? Seems like all of their success has been via acquisition. Not saying other companies aren't in the same boat, but it seems counter-intuitive that their stock price is supposed to reflect their value/execution ability when that seems to fall flat when they attempt to create something new.

Messenger and Marketplace are insanely successful. You have to be willfully blind to not see it.

Messenger feels fair, if an odd choice. I mostly loathe how much effort companies seem to be going to in order to lock in their users to message only with each other.

I am curious on statistics of the marketplace. I confess I've never used it and I'm not at all clear on who does.

There's a lot of precious opinions about how things like social media networks should look and be experienced by the user. And we _love_ to look down on the fact that people use them everyday, multiple times a day. What Instagram (or Facebook, etc) now is what Instagram is. What Instagram _was_ no longer exists as it continues generating revenue, so… what's the problem?

FWIW, I'm a <5m day Instagram user. I try to promote the things I make with it. I barely noticed that those new inserts were Threads posts until I read about it here. All that says to me is modern users are good at finding what they want out of the app and ignoring whatever doesn't work for them.

They could also have grown threads by owning the domain name.

Also by actually having a desktop website for threads.

Also by having a standalone user registration system, not the same one as instagram.

Also perhaps by spending some of those billions doing actual advertising. I’ve never seen a single ad for threads. Compare that to any new movie which is on every media channel, on YouTube, on billboards, on the side of buses, on bus stops.

Things that seem to me to be absolute minimums required.

Threads.com is owned by an ex-Facebook employee who launched a Slack alternative in 2017. I would be surprised if they were to give up a strong domain name (and brand that they surely have trademarks for) that easily!

So if you’re saying Facebook can’t get the .com then frankly it’s the wrong product name.

Who cares? threads.net works totally fine, and most users are on Mobile anyways. They started with thefacebook.com, and they turned out fine.

People keep saying that the domain doesn’t matter.

That desktop doesn’t matter.

And yet so far threads has sunk even with its initial huge interest.

Maybe those things matter.

people keep talking about threads like it's failing, but i use it every day and it seems alive to me. most of the people i followed on twitter are there, and there's enough content to keep me generally interested every time i open the app and to keep me coming back.

i think something like knowing whether or not they have a desktop app should be a prerequisite for having an opinion on whether they're failing or not.

I tried it when it first came out and it didn’t have a desktop.

I’m not making any further effort to jump on every two weeks and see if Facebook did the absolute minimum in building one.

Multi hundred billion dollar company can spend money advertising if it wants to get a message to me whilst I’m going about my life.

The Desktop version has been out for months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com