Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the new Threads app is made

emergetools.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 251 posts

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#191

Post by dimmke »

VintageCool wrote: post #188
8note wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has covered the interesting angle -- this is the first time I've seen social media companies launch direct competitors, rather than a novel way to capture attention. At least, the first time in a while

Facebook/Instagram Reels is a TikTok clone to directly compete in that space. YouTube Shorts also exists to compete with TikTok.

Yeah, and even TikTok itself has done this. There was this flash in the pan social media app that was popular for like 2-3 months at some point in the past year (I forget when) called BeReal and TikTok added an exact clone of the functionality.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#192

Post by wraptile »

coolbreezetft22 wrote: post #15
wbobeirne wrote: post #4

Have there been any public plans for a fully featured web app? Having it be read-only on the web is a non-starter for me.

I'm not even getting read-only on the web, as of this morning it just redirects me to the main page which does nothing?

They seem to have started to redirect to web login page which doesn't exist yet so it redirects to homepage when you "power use".

I noticed it's becoming unbrowsable on my VPN where other IP users probably use up all of the "free view" tokens for the shared IP address. I guess that's one way for Meta to have their cake and eat it too.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#193

Post by rebuilder »

yeeetz wrote: post #103
ryandrake wrote: post #96

I'm kind of amazed at how saturated the news is with stories about Threads. And not just tech news, but also every mainstream news site has at least one or more "submarine" marketing articles promoting Threads. Meta Marketing Team: You're not fooling anyone into thinking these are grassroots and viral, but honestly, well done with the media saturation. Meta's clearly got all the right channels on full-blast. It's rea…

Honestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.

The problem is, it’s made by Meta. I remember when Facebook was a place you went to get in touch with friends. That was a long time ago now - at some point they stopped showing the feed in chronological order and I thought it was the worst change. They just kept making it worse. Now, if I go look, most of my feed is just random “viral” content and ads.

Meta takes a thing you find useful and gradually tweaks it until it no longer does what you originally wanted it for. I don’t trust them to run a service .

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#194

Post by wraptile »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #93
jheriko wrote: post #82

amazing how massive they made it with so little functionality classic shitware

This comment reminds me of when American based AAA game studios were mad about Elden Ring's success. What functionality is missing that you would add?

> What functionality is missing that you would add?

Are you being satirical? There's literally no functionality beyond the very basics. No timeline customization, advance posting, search, polls, hashtags, view customization, history management, lists, account deletion...

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#195

Post by throwaway2990 »

edmundsauto wrote: post #78
wmeredith wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks. By active users, yes Twitter is smaller than many of the other big networks. But by influence, Twitter is one of, if not the biggest fish in the pond. @[username] is everywhere in advertising and news programs. People don't break news on Facebook and Instagram. There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion for Twitter, and it wasn…

The last year has significantly weakened Twitter's position. Musk paid $44B for a company that was almost immediately worth less; he has massively harmed it's image for further valuation reduction. The recent "must be logged in to view tweets" and "only X00 items available" combined with the increase in hate speech weakened it even further. Further, Twitter has laid off 75% of the people who could help combat this pu…

75% of the staff were useless. And that’s been evident over the last 6 months.

Threads is not a threat at the moment. Everyone I follow has already gone back to Twitter and hasn’t posted on threads since the first day.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#196

Post by craftsman »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #71
epistasis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impo…

Hahah I love the bias here. Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going to hell. Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP that fast.

The person you are replying to did not say both of those things.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#197

Post by kalleboo »

jshier wrote: post #168
housemusicfan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't far from the truth. Have you seen the list of App Store data collection permissions it requests? For what amounts in functionality to little more than a terminal session to a BBS? Holy shit. I verified it's longer than TikTok's which is widely assumed to be a hostile state-backed surveillance tool at this point. For Threads, the following may be "collected and linked to your identity": Health & Fitness Pur…

Those aren't permissions it requests, it has no permissions by default. Instead it's the broadest interpretation of data it could gather from any of its features and dependencies (an app granting a permission grants it to all frameworks as well). But they will have to ask about all of them, especially health data. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a broad, general list they imported from other Meta apps in the rush…

It's not even anything about features or frameworks or dependencies.

It's literally just checkboxes inside App Store Connect when you submit the app.

Basically it's what Meta's lawyers think needs to be disclosed.

I'm sure they do sentiment analysis on your IG posts, put you in advertising targeting cohorts like "cancer survivor", and that's what they mean by "health data". Not that it's getting anything from the iOS Health app.

Apple guidelines, especially around user-submitted content, have some leeway in interpretation if they are "optional to disclose" or not. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-privacy-details/#o...

If I'm posting all day on Threads about my health, that doesn't sound like "Collection of the data occurs only in infrequent cases that are not part of your app’s primary functionality", and hence they need to declare literally anything a user might be posting about.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#198

Post by yeeetz »

0xDEF wrote: post #133
yeeetz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.

>Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic This is correct but it's helpful to specify how much more toxic twitter has become than other platforms. For example anti-LGBT sentiments are common on other platforms just like they are common in society. But on twitter people like Jake Shields literally call for the murder of therapists, doctors, and teachers who are supportive of LGBT teens. How did twitter respond? First…

Yeah, IMO Musk seriously overestimated the average person's tolerance for toxic and hateful political content.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#199

Post by akmarinov »

jheriko wrote: post #82

amazing how massive they made it with so little functionality classic shitware

Reminder that outside of devs - no one would really care if your whole app’s functionality is copy pasted across all classes, has a million dependencies and is unmanageable devwise if it brings in the dough

No company cares about purity, architecture or how beautiful the code is, the only reason most do is because it aligns with maintenance costing less and being able to develop features faster

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#200

Post by sangnoir »

yeeetz wrote: post #198
0xDEF wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic This is correct but it's helpful to specify how much more toxic twitter has become than other platforms. For example anti-LGBT sentiments are common on other platforms just like they are common in society. But on twitter people like Jake Shields literally call for the murder of therapists, doctors, and teachers who are supportive of LGBT teens. How did twitter respond? First…

Yeah, IMO Musk seriously overestimated the average person's tolerance for toxic and hateful political content.

I think it was a very deliberate ploy by Musk to shift the political Overton window to way to the right.

Unfortunately for him & his backers, the political shenanigans and general incompetence left Twitter vulnerable, with users seemingly choosing to trust Meta over it, of all fucking companies. This will be case study in business school for years.

Post reply on HN