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This isn't a critique of Threads, this a commentary on the nature of social graphs and different identities in different spaces. People use IG different than th
by motoxpro 3y ago
This isn't a critique of Threads, this a commentary on the nature of social graphs and different identities in different spaces. People use IG different than they use Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc.
You could get the same experience on Twitter by following Dora the Explorer, Procter and Gamble, your uncle, and Brian Chesky but you have chosen to have a specific experience in that app by curating your feed.
A better example, port LinkedIn's graph to Snapchat and it would seem like absolute nonsense.
IG ported a visual social graph to a text based app, this, by definition, isn't going to produce the most optimal experience. Thats 100% fine though, you'll realize who is good at posting text content, follow them, you'll unfollow the people that are not good, etc.
This is why TikTok was interesting in the first place because it removed the curation step and created an interest graph instead of a social one. What the poster is talking about is the friction inheirent to using a social graph as a proxy for an interest graph.
"I love when you talk about tech but I don't care at all about your dog."
- weebull 3y agoI agree, but it allowed meta to say they had a bajillion users from day one, and make the news. Nothing worse than an empty social network to make people run away.
- motoxpro 3y agoTotally. I think they did the exact right thing. Brilliant strategy because not only does it kick start the network, but it introduces a entirely new group of people to text based social media that never tried/were into Twitter.
- phailhaus 3y agoThere's the similar but related problem of "I'm more interested in creative posts today, but there's no way for me to register that intent". So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
- CharlesW 3y ago> So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress. FYI, TikTok also has explicit like/dislike signals. For example, you can love posts, or long-press the video and choose "Not Interested".
- nomel 3y agoFrom what I've seen, loving a post has less impact that watching a video loop a few times. It appears that view time is the strongest signal, which seems logical.
- phailhaus 3y agoAnd yet, that's so frustrating because sometimes I'm just curious! I really hate platforms that implicitly use view time as a signal because I have to be aware of that and make sure I don't spend too long on certain kinds of content. It forces me to "keep moving or else it'll learn something wrong about me", but since it's implicit there's no real way to know what it learned.
- imbnwa 3y agoCommenting and liking a post is even stronger
- phailhaus 3y agoRight, but what does "dislike" or "not interested" do? It's not that I hate it completely, but it's just not what I want to look at right now. So instead, I'm going to swipe through until I find some related stuff, like that, then hope the algorithm picks up on it. And then tomorrow, I have to get it to unlearn that because I'm looking for something else.
- delecti 3y agoInstagram's "explore" page works pretty excellently for this; each post on the grid there is essentially a separate feed. For example on mine the top several posts are: queer art, Zelda, car crash videos, less specific art, 40k memes, politics relevant to me, cat memes, and so on. Each of those is something that Instagram has good reason to think I'd like, and the posts stay fairly consistent with the vibe of the first post as I scroll through any of those feeds.
- haolez 3y agoI get this a lot on Twitter. There is a very interesting tech account that I follow that half the time is complaining about British politics. It's really frustrating, since I don't want to ditch the tech posts
- yieldcrv 3y agoagreed, pre-social media people “stayed on brand” because thats all you ever saw of them nobody needs to know their favorite stoic keynote speaker does anything else
- cglong 3y agoI was briefly in a Facebook A/B test that automatically categorized every post by everyone. I then had the option to "Unfollow Alice for posts about Politics". It was glorious, and I always wonder why they never released that broadly.
- beachy 3y agoI marvel at the resources available to FB that they could release such a far reaching capability as an experiment.
- rtsil 3y agoProbably because it reduced engagement.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThat, plus hours after deployment it would hit US national news, and hours later you'd have politicians accusing Meta/Facebook of bias because their political spam was correctly labeled as political spam, but the opposite side's politician's cooking recipes were NOT labeled as political spam, which reeks of favorism, bias, and is anti-democratic in several different ways.
- cglong 3y agoInterestingly, I can see this going either direction. In my case, this feature caused me to refollow Alice, enabling me to see most of her posts and thus increasing my engagement. OTOH, I bet not many people use the "stay friends but unfollow them" functionality.
- coolbreezetft22 3y agoThe way I used twitter (and now threads) is just by navigating directly to the URL of the accounts I want to read. I'd discover other accounts I'd want to "follow" usually via re-tweets. In this way Threads is going to be the exact same experience for me as long as the same accounts I read on Twitter are posting on Threads.