It’s been a year since Meta launched Threads in an attempt to take over the platform now known as X. Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that he hoped it would turn into “a public conversation app with over 1 billion people on it.”
Meta’s timing was good. Threads launched at a particularly chaotic time for Twitter, when many people were looking for alternatives. Threads saw 30 million signups on its first day, and the app has since grown to 100 million monthly users, according to Zuckerberg. (X has (According to Elon Musk, these are monthly users.)
But the first iteration of Threads still felt a little broken. There was no web version and lots of . The company promised interoperability with ActivityPub, the open-source standard that powers Mastodon and other apps in the fediverse, but integration remains .
A year later, it’s still not entirely clear what Threads is actually for. Its leader says that “the goal is not to replace Twitter,” but to create a “public square” for Instagram users and a “less angry place for conversation.” But the service itself still has a number of issues that are preventing it from realizing this vision. If Meta really wants that to happen, it needs to change that.
Fix the ‘For You’ Algorithm
If you follow me on Threads, you probably already know that this is my biggest gripe. But Meta desperately needs to fix the algorithm that powers Threads’ default “For You” feed. The algorithmic feed, which is the default view on both the app and the website, is painfully slow, often surfacing days-old posts even during important, newsworthy moments when lots of people are posting about the same topic.
It’s so bad that it’s become a recurring meme to post something along the lines of, “I can’t wait to read more about this in my ‘For You’ feed tomorrow,” every time there’s a major news event or trending story.
The algorithmic feed is also downright bizarre. For a platform built on Instagram, an app with extremely refined recommendations and over a decade of data on the topics I’m interested in, Threads doesn’t seem to take advantage of it. Instead, it has a strange preference for intensely personal stories from accounts I have nothing to do with.
Over the past year, I’ve seen countless multi-part Threads posts from complete strangers describing child abuse, eating disorders, chronic illness, domestic violence, pet loss, and other unimaginable horrors. These aren’t posts I’m looking for, but Meta’s algorithm pushes them to the top of my feed anyway.
I’ve been using Threads’ swipe aggressively to try to rid my feed of excessive trauma dumping, and it has helped to some extent. But it has also increased the number of strange posts I see from completely random people. Right now, the top two posts in my feed are from an event planner sharing wedding tips and a woman describing a phone call from her health insurance company. (Both posts are 12 hours old.) Posts like these have led blogger Max to dub Read Threads the “,” because they make it feel like everyone “has some kind of mild brain damage.”
Stop avoiding news, politics and anything ‘potentially sensitive’
Look, I get why Meta has been cautious about moderating content on Threads. The company doesn’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to things like extremism, health misinformation, or genocide-inciting hate speech. It’s no surprise that they’d want to avoid similar headlines about Threads.
But if Meta wants Threads to be a “public square,” it can’t search for topics like COVID-19 and vaccines just because they’re “potentially sensitive.” (Instagram head Adam Mosseri claimed last October that this measure was “temporary.”) If Meta wants Threads to be a “public square,” it can’t strip political content from user recommendations; and Threads leaders can’t assume that users are seeing news.
DMs, DMs, DMs
A year later, it’s painfully clear that a platform like Threads is handicapped without a proper direct messaging feature. For some reason, Threads’ leaders, particularly Mosseri, are adamantly opposed to creating a separate inbox for the app.
Instead, users who want to privately connect with someone on Threads are forced to switch to Instagram and hope that the person they’re trying to reach accepts new message requests. There is an in-app way to post a Threads message to an Instagram friend, but it relies on you already being connected on Instagram.
Why Threads can’t have its own messaging feature isn’t entirely clear. Mosseri has suggested that it doesn’t make sense to build a new inbox for the app, but that ignores the fact that many people use Instagram and Threads very differently. Which brings me to…
Unlink discussions from Instagram
Meta says that much of the reason Threads was able to get out the door so quickly was thanks to Instagram. Threads was built using a lot of Instagram’s code and infrastructure, which also helped the company get tens of millions of people to sign up for the app on
But requiring an Instagram account to use Threads remains a year later. For one, it excludes a significant number of people who might be interested in Threads but don’t want to be on Instagram,
There’s also the fact that the apps, while they share some design elements, are completely different kinds of services. And many people, myself included, use Instagram and Threads very differently.
A “public square” platform like Threads works best for public accounts, where conversations can be maximized in visibility. But most people I know use their Instagram accounts for personal updates, like family photos. And while you can have different visibility settings for each app, you shouldn’t be forced to link the two accounts. This also means that if you want to use Threads anonymously, you’ll need to create an entirely new Instagram account to act as the login for the associated Threads account.
It seems that Meta is at least considering this. Mosseri said in with Platform game that the company is “working on things like Threads-only accounts” and wants the app to become “more independent.”
These aren’t the only factors that will determine whether Threads will be, as Zuckerberg has speculated, Meta’s next billion-user app. Meta will eventually need to make money off the service, which is currently ad-free. But before Meta can turn its multibillion-dollar advertising machine on Threads, the company will have to do a better job of explaining who its latest app is actually for.