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I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. Of course FB is going

I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. Of course FB is going to do that otherwise they lose a massive edge against any competitor. But for me at least my Twitter is a very different social space to my Instagram and there’s very little crossover. So Threads looks like it’ll be text posts with your Instagram friends. Which is fine, I suppose. But not a Twitter replacement.

FormerBandmate 3y ago
Even the recommended page is completely different. It’s Twitter when celebrities used it before Donald Trump completely reshaped the platform
88913527 3y ago
Text posts with your Meta friends sounds like Facebook from 2010. What is old is new again, I suppose.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Facebook minus all your annoying boomer parents/relatives (who have no idea what Instagram is or how to install an app) and their political posts and screeds sounds amazing.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Also the same thing as Facebook prior to 2010.
    - anshumankmr 3y ago
      Facebook was pretty good in the early 2010s also, in my anecdotal experience when the most popular thing on my feed used to funny iPhone chat memes and 9Gag
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    No thanks. I like Instagram because it's mostly mindless photos or videos of people's lives. It also makes it a bit more difficult to reshare things which is part of the appeal imo, of it as an independent platform different from other social networks. If it becomes anything else, I'm out. I have barely logged into Facebook for years but I'll use Insta occasionally. I use Twitter for casual industry connections and focused topics, and I unfollow people that get heavily, emotionally political.
- gsatic 3y ago
  What problem are they solving? No one has any idea. Info keeps exploding instead of shrinking.
  - enufstuff 3y ago
    > What problem are they solving? Twitter.
    - jscipione 3y ago
      Twitter is great, there is no problem, I don’t understand.
      - BudaDude 3y ago
        Okay Elon
        t0bia_s 3y ago
        What, Zuck?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    > What problem are they solving? Think of it as the match Zuckerberg lit to mask the stench of the Horizon Worlds carcass.
foogazi 3y ago
> it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account you can skip this step
- afavour 3y ago
  So they say. I’ve already gotten my first notification about an Instagram friend posting on Threads for the first time, which is an obvious push to get me to follow them. I’m convinced they’ll keep jamming your Instagram and Threads identities into each other to keep engagement high.
stuckkeys 3y ago
Yeah it is a dog shit of a post. Uses your existing instagram account. Hype hype hype. Uninstalled it right after it installed.
Apofis 3y ago
Instagram comments are not very good and rarely create a discussion, if that's what they're extrapolating it's going to the Meta-Graveyard pretty quickly.
doctoboggan 3y ago
At least in this case they have confirmed[0] that it will intern with the fediverse, which makes it difference from other social network launches in the past. [0]: copy/past from threads.net: "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @username@threads.net."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- necovek 3y ago
  Facebook Messenger and Google Talk started off as full XMPP (Jabber) clients: I remember talking to people using Pidgin and whatever Gnome client was of the day (E-something) over my own self-hosted ejabberd. As soon as they grow over the need for interoperability, they kill it off.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
There's an important point you make. Google plus failed. But a few of us loved it, because of its interface and ease of managing for the large part, but also because we interacted differently with and with different people than on Facebook instagram etc. Whereas Facebook to your point is dominated by my friends and family (but less and less their original content and more and more with copied "memes), Google plus rapidly developed shared circles of interesting people with interesting things to say. Thay we could flow. Pretty quickly my google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Not even HN has quite reached thay zenith for me. (Twitter by all accounts does that for some. I have not been able to get over / subjugate it's insane formatting and threading limitations and sorting and algorithms and submit them to my will).
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  Threads is definitely going to be dominated by friends and family. It already is, it’s just that and memes. Twitter is much closer to your Google+, and Threads in no way will be anything like that from what I’ve seen of it over the past few hours
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Friends and Family won't be churning out grist for the mill anywhere near as fast as Facebook needs. Instagram has just as many loudmouth influencers as elsewhere, they just don't get screenshotted like tweets do. This will change that.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  > google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?
  - 411111111111111 3y ago
    As a general rule of thumb: The general public is not interested in high quality content. They're much more interested in instant gratification and mindless entertainment, which was sufficiently catered to on the original platforms, so the critical mass of people never switched over. Another factor surely was that - at the time - reddit was another platform for high quality discussions on specific topics and made it much easier to find like minded people through the subreddit segmentation. While the circle functionality worked decently in g+, you still had to actually create and join them, which meant it was too exclusionary and involved to really get going.
femto113 3y ago
Fortunately Meta has chickens and eggs. Bootstrapping the graph from Instagram hopefully means that Threads gets enough critical mass that Twitter->Threads tooling (ala Mastodon's Movetodon or Debirdify) will actually work becausethe people you follow on Twitter will already be on Threads when you run them.
ericmay 3y ago
The problem with Twitter competitors was/is the very thing you mention - lack of accounts to follow. Threads solves this I think sufficiently. What will keep me from using it at least as of today is that I can’t tell it to only show content (plus ads I guess) of accounts that I follow. I never ever ever want to see posts from some influencer or something - if they pay to advertise then fine, but otherwise hell no. So far Twitter has the staying power for me but I’m excited to see what develops here.
joe_the_user 3y ago
The only thing I care about on Twitter is the emergency services that use it. I can no longer access their info now that Twitter requires a sign-in and it would be nice to have that access.
- jumpCastle 3y ago
  They no longer require sign-in. Got scared of the reaction.
  - joe_the_user 3y ago
    For the record, the above is not true.
gexla 3y ago
It also seems like a problem for anonymity. On Twitter, I can create multiple accounts and I can stay anonymous if I like. I don't know about IG, but FB only allows one account. I don't want my info leaking somehow. I also have a very different Twitter space from my FB space. Though my IG is also different from my FB.
- jonahhorowitz 3y ago
  Instagram lets you create unrelated "subaccounts" that are tied to your main account. I have one just so I can have a public account that I use to follow F1 drivers. This is great because I don't get spoilers on my main Instagram account and I also can post pictures from F1 events, etc. that my family wouldn't care about.
  - graeme 3y ago
    I know you can switch accounts on instagram. How do you make sub accounts? When I searched I only found info on multiple accounts
- rchaud 3y ago
  You need to provide a phone number to sign up for Twitter these days.
enufstuff 3y ago
> I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. I had a different reaction. "Oh they started with my Insta list which isn't what I want. I'll keep them for now and slowly replace them with stuff I use Twitter for." In other words, not a big deal to me and not something that immediately stood out as being an issue.
rumblerock 3y ago
I noticed this with the base experience after auto-following all my Instagram follows. But what isn't in the app yet is a "trending" / "recommended" section, which I imagine is ready to go once they bootstrap enough data for it. Any person or entity with PR value or internet clout is likely already gearing up to post across both platforms, so a typhoon of data is about to flow in. Once that exists then they can move to the next stage of enveloping most of what Twitter has to offer. My question is, will Elon ban people from posting links to their Threads accounts?

FormerBandmate 3y ago

Even the recommended page is completely different. It’s Twitter when celebrities used it before Donald Trump completely reshaped the platform

88913527 3y ago

Text posts with your Meta friends sounds like Facebook from 2010. What is old is new again, I suppose.

qbasic_forever 3y ago
Facebook minus all your annoying boomer parents/relatives (who have no idea what Instagram is or how to install an app) and their political posts and screeds sounds amazing.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Also the same thing as Facebook prior to 2010.
  - anshumankmr 3y ago
    Facebook was pretty good in the early 2010s also, in my anecdotal experience when the most popular thing on my feed used to funny iPhone chat memes and 9Gag
- chrisco255 3y ago
  No thanks. I like Instagram because it's mostly mindless photos or videos of people's lives. It also makes it a bit more difficult to reshare things which is part of the appeal imo, of it as an independent platform different from other social networks. If it becomes anything else, I'm out. I have barely logged into Facebook for years but I'll use Insta occasionally. I use Twitter for casual industry connections and focused topics, and I unfollow people that get heavily, emotionally political.
gsatic 3y ago
What problem are they solving? No one has any idea. Info keeps exploding instead of shrinking.
- enufstuff 3y ago
  > What problem are they solving? Twitter.
  - jscipione 3y ago
    Twitter is great, there is no problem, I don’t understand.
    - BudaDude 3y ago
      Okay Elon
      - t0bia_s 3y ago
        What, Zuck?
- rchaud 3y ago
  > What problem are they solving? Think of it as the match Zuckerberg lit to mask the stench of the Horizon Worlds carcass.

foogazi 3y ago

> it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account you can skip this step

afavour 3y ago
So they say. I’ve already gotten my first notification about an Instagram friend posting on Threads for the first time, which is an obvious push to get me to follow them. I’m convinced they’ll keep jamming your Instagram and Threads identities into each other to keep engagement high.

stuckkeys 3y ago

Yeah it is a dog shit of a post. Uses your existing instagram account. Hype hype hype. Uninstalled it right after it installed.

Apofis 3y ago

Instagram comments are not very good and rarely create a discussion, if that's what they're extrapolating it's going to the Meta-Graveyard pretty quickly.

doctoboggan 3y ago

At least in this case they have confirmed[0] that it will intern with the fediverse, which makes it difference from other social network launches in the past. [0]: copy/past from threads.net: "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @username@threads.net."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
necovek 3y ago
Facebook Messenger and Google Talk started off as full XMPP (Jabber) clients: I remember talking to people using Pidgin and whatever Gnome client was of the day (E-something) over my own self-hosted ejabberd. As soon as they grow over the need for interoperability, they kill it off.

NikolaNovak 3y ago

There's an important point you make. Google plus failed. But a few of us loved it, because of its interface and ease of managing for the large part, but also because we interacted differently with and with different people than on Facebook instagram etc. Whereas Facebook to your point is dominated by my friends and family (but less and less their original content and more and more with copied "memes), Google plus rapidly developed shared circles of interesting people with interesting things to say. Thay we could flow. Pretty quickly my google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Not even HN has quite reached thay zenith for me. (Twitter by all accounts does that for some. I have not been able to get over / subjugate it's insane formatting and threading limitations and sorting and algorithms and submit them to my will).

FormerBandmate 3y ago
Threads is definitely going to be dominated by friends and family. It already is, it’s just that and memes. Twitter is much closer to your Google+, and Threads in no way will be anything like that from what I’ve seen of it over the past few hours
- rchaud 3y ago
  Friends and Family won't be churning out grist for the mill anywhere near as fast as Facebook needs. Instagram has just as many loudmouth influencers as elsewhere, they just don't get screenshotted like tweets do. This will change that.
everybodyknows 3y ago
> google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?
- 411111111111111 3y ago
  As a general rule of thumb: The general public is not interested in high quality content. They're much more interested in instant gratification and mindless entertainment, which was sufficiently catered to on the original platforms, so the critical mass of people never switched over. Another factor surely was that - at the time - reddit was another platform for high quality discussions on specific topics and made it much easier to find like minded people through the subreddit segmentation. While the circle functionality worked decently in g+, you still had to actually create and join them, which meant it was too exclusionary and involved to really get going.

femto113 3y ago

Fortunately Meta has chickens and eggs. Bootstrapping the graph from Instagram hopefully means that Threads gets enough critical mass that Twitter->Threads tooling (ala Mastodon's Movetodon or Debirdify) will actually work becausethe people you follow on Twitter will already be on Threads when you run them.

ericmay 3y ago

The problem with Twitter competitors was/is the very thing you mention - lack of accounts to follow. Threads solves this I think sufficiently. What will keep me from using it at least as of today is that I can’t tell it to only show content (plus ads I guess) of accounts that I follow. I never ever ever want to see posts from some influencer or something - if they pay to advertise then fine, but otherwise hell no. So far Twitter has the staying power for me but I’m excited to see what develops here.

joe_the_user 3y ago

The only thing I care about on Twitter is the emergency services that use it. I can no longer access their info now that Twitter requires a sign-in and it would be nice to have that access.

jumpCastle 3y ago
They no longer require sign-in. Got scared of the reaction.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  For the record, the above is not true.

gexla 3y ago

It also seems like a problem for anonymity. On Twitter, I can create multiple accounts and I can stay anonymous if I like. I don't know about IG, but FB only allows one account. I don't want my info leaking somehow. I also have a very different Twitter space from my FB space. Though my IG is also different from my FB.

jonahhorowitz 3y ago
Instagram lets you create unrelated "subaccounts" that are tied to your main account. I have one just so I can have a public account that I use to follow F1 drivers. This is great because I don't get spoilers on my main Instagram account and I also can post pictures from F1 events, etc. that my family wouldn't care about.
- graeme 3y ago
  I know you can switch accounts on instagram. How do you make sub accounts? When I searched I only found info on multiple accounts
rchaud 3y ago
You need to provide a phone number to sign up for Twitter these days.

enufstuff 3y ago

> I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. I had a different reaction. "Oh they started with my Insta list which isn't what I want. I'll keep them for now and slowly replace them with stuff I use Twitter for." In other words, not a big deal to me and not something that immediately stood out as being an issue.

rumblerock 3y ago

I noticed this with the base experience after auto-following all my Instagram follows. But what isn't in the app yet is a "trending" / "recommended" section, which I imagine is ready to go once they bootstrap enough data for it. Any person or entity with PR value or internet clout is likely already gearing up to post across both platforms, so a typhoon of data is about to flow in. Once that exists then they can move to the next stage of enveloping most of what Twitter has to offer. My question is, will Elon ban people from posting links to their Threads accounts?