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Comment by sockaddr | Hacker News Reader

I’d bet Meta is counting all the random Instagram users that accidentally interact with the forced threads clickbait posts in their feed.

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It's so transparent too, the way every single threads post shown in the Instagram widget ends halfway through with "..."

I've managed to never go there because I'm only on Instagram for the pretty pictures

Aha I see clearly now. So that is my Reddit make you reload a comment thread when you click the 'expand thread' sometimes. To get more add views? I just thought it was inline with all their other crappy ux choises.

In this case they want to increase some KPI instead.

Christ. Some people are willing to believe anything when it affirms their baseless beliefs. You’ve taken some reply that was about another situation entirely and let it convince you. I can think of multiple more likely explanations. Enough for this to at least be in the “who knows?” bucket.

Ye I had a revelation about something totally unrelated, when reading about one KPI hack, that the Reddit load new page upon clicking expand comment, also most likely is one.

What would be a good reason for that, that is not KPI hacking? The extra text is bogger all bandwidth wise.

Social networks hook users in with the one little trick ... click here to find out why you should be using it too.

You can't interact with that without creating a Threads account (manually) and without having Threads app installed at the moment of click on the Instagram embed. And if you did that, you are a proper user of Threads, so no double count happens.

But that doesn't really matter right? They got tricked into using it but they're still using it

It certainly matters as a bellwether for future traction.

It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.

The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.

Does Google do that for advertising? I always wonder if my little game of hitting SKIP ASAP shows up as a valid engagement or a user-bailed or something.

And the ads, I can't skip, I hate those MFers.

They have a general metric for it:

> An ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least 1 second for display ads, or at least 2 seconds for video ads.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7029393?hl=en

Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after

Treads is accesible via the browser now too

I click on it randomly to see if anything is going on and usually close it pretty rapidly, so that is almost a false positive. I find bsky much more of of a time sink

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