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How the new Threads app is made

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Re: How the new Threads app is made

#41

Post by mowse_winded »

extr wrote: post #13
hospitalJail wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook isnt going to be nice about this. They know they are in a strong position here. Expect an addicting algorithm that is fueled by ragebait (and if its anything like IG, coombait). The fact that it didn't release with an ability to time-sort tells you everything you need to know. Everyone knows how easy it is to sort by time, especially when stakes are low. Its anti-consumer from day 1. The surge in people are…

I don't think it's that sinister. Time based sorting is a bad day 1 feature since nobody has much of a follow graph yet. Forcing the algorithm is a good way to make sure your feed feels "full" even if you're starting from zero. I don't like the algorithm either, it's full of brands and spammy meme pages that lifted their content over from IG. But in terms of cold-starting a social graph, I get it. Plus they already s…

I thought it pulled your social graph from Instagram.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#42

Post by akira2501 »

999900000999 wrote: post #32
lern_too_spel wrote: post #30

72 MB is egregious for a Twitter-clone MVP. For comparison, the full-featured Twitter app itself is 40 MB. The Mastodon app weighs in at 1.6 MB.

The target consumer doesn't care, wasting time optimizing for space doesn't make sense in this instance . I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately own the React Native project.

> The target consumer doesn't care

The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's point of view, more like a "digital subscriber."

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#44

Post by timeon »

shadowgovt wrote: post #40
troupo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People care. You just refuse to listen to what they say. They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't hear because they can only hear when someone talks about megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc.

It's really hard to hear what they say over the sound of 70M+ downloads. Actions speak a lot louder than words. "The customer is always right in matters of taste."

> 70M+ downloads

Downloads are one thing. People are curious. Will they keep it?

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#45

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

dahwolf wrote: post #33

[flagged]

With 1b people, you've just qualified 15% of the planet as "obnoxious, superficial, bottom of the barrel culture, cheap, narcissistic, lacking any depth.".

I'm not sure why you'd exclude Facebook users though, that's 3b or 40% of all humans.

Earth is beyond salvageable

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#46

Post by hotdogscout »

dahwolf wrote: post #33

[flagged]

short form social media is an industrial farm of mental illness. it surrounds you with histrionics with all the time possible to spare, minimal commitment and inundates your monkey-brained need for peer approval with their low standards.

leaving leftist online spaces was the decision that had the most positive impact on my life. any community based around a struggle will have a hard time not being a pit of vindictive envy regardless of ideology.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#47

Post by nwallin »

londons_explore wrote: post #34

> ig_signals_cupid_better_recall_v1.mlmodelc Are they using on-device ML? Why?

They're probably just using an already trained model. They're almost certainly not training a model on-device.

AFAIK both the iphone and the pixel have a chip that are specifically designed to do forward propagation on a deep neural network. I don't know much about them though.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#48

Post by MisterSandman »

troupo wrote: post #38
colesantiago wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This didn't stop 70M+ users from downloading the app and using it. Nobody cares.

People care. You just refuse to listen to what they say. They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't hear because they can only hear when someone talks about megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc.

> my internet cap is reached

1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.

2. Threads' main user base is Instagram. An hour of watching Instagram Reels is more data than the entire Threads app. I highly doubt Instagram users are data strapped.

> "my battery is drained faster"

App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out. If you're saying Threads is not optimized, I disagree. And again, considering the main targeted user base is Instagram and Twitter, Threads is going to be significantly better than either app in terms of battery life (little to no video options right now)

> "my phone is slow"

Same as above, basically.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#49

Post by londons_explore »

nwallin wrote: post #47
londons_explore wrote: post #34

> ig_signals_cupid_better_recall_v1.mlmodelc Are they using on-device ML? Why?

They're probably just using an already trained model. They're almost certainly not training a model on-device. AFAIK both the iphone and the pixel have a chip that are specifically designed to do forward propagation on a deep neural network. I don't know much about them though.

True - but what model would they want to use on-device?

All the feed ranking stuff is done serverside I assume... And apart from that, the app is just for posting and reading text and pictures. I don't really see any use for any ML there.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#50

Post by epistasis »

coldcode wrote: post #29
arcticbull wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and the binary size shrink will look good on someone's performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real impact on usa…

They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a…

Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with.

Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts.

A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.

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