How the new Threads app is made • Hacker News Board

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#201

Post by troupo » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #55

troupo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks Twitter has 450 million monthly active users at a generous guess. Facebook's MAU: 2.98 billion Instagram's MAU: 1 billion Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks. Unlike most, Facebook actually knows how to build a social network, and grow it.

> 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 reason Musk wanted to buy Twitter was to satisfy bis own enormous ego and whims. He did try to get out of buying it though.

As for relevance... A few more great business decisions from Musk, and Twitter's relevance will plummet to unrecoverable depths. All Facebook has to do with Threads is not do obvious mistakes.

But that all is completely beside the point. The original claim was "They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks".

"Large networks" are counted in terms of MAU and hours of engagement. And Twitter is rapidly losing it's relevance. Because FB's (and everyone's) largest competitors are

1. Time. There's only 24 hours in the day

2. Social networks and products grabbing that time: TikTok and video streaming services

Twitter doesn't really enter the equation.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#202

Post by gumballindie » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:05 AM UTC

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…

Brings unfond memories of when openai spammed everything under the sun to promote their little chatbot.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#203

Post by gumballindie » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:07 AM UTC

Anything that kills off twitter is welcome. Even something made by facebook.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#204

Post by demarq » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:07 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #104

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…

HN is downright quiet on the topic, with only 21 posts over 20 comments since the launch (2023-07-05), 4 posts per day. Compare that to the Reddit blackout posts which seem to be closer to 8 posts per day. Only 8 posts with over 100 comments, whereas it's hard to find even a single Reddit blackout post at less than 100 comments. My friends in every other community are buzzing about Threads, but here on HN someone com…

As the poster above said, the hype may not be organic, so I wouldn’t expect communities to be talking about threads. The media might be all the source of the hype.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#205

Post by jacobp100 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:15 AM UTC

gravitronic wrote: post #3

Any clues to what percentage is made with react native? https://www.threads.net/t/CuW_fXZOgPc/ would suggest to me the answer is "not much"

It’ll be hard to tell just from file sizes. Stuff like the news feed is unlikely to use it - but maybe things like profile pages, settings, search

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#206

Post by jacobp100 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:21 AM UTC

WoodenChair wrote: post #161

I'd like to know if the non-React parts of the iOS app are UIKit or SwiftUI.

It’ll be UIKit. It’s very easy to bind UIKit components to React Native. The same can’t be said for SwiftUI components

That said, if there’s any home screen widgets or a watch app, they will be SwiftUI

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#207

Post by jacobp100 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

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.

React Native isn’t good for things like news feeds. Any extremely long lists where each item has a different height, it performs poorly on

However, the RN architecture does make it incredibly easy to bind to components written in native code - or use react native components from within native code

It was never Meta’s intention that something would not contain app-specific native code

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#208

Post by wodenokoto » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:37 AM UTC

granzymes wrote: post #153

wlesieutre wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can just imagine it, “spend $500/month with Twitter Pay and you get a green checkmark, promoting your tweets even above the already promoted blue checkmark tweeters”

Meta isn’t that stupid. Messing with the verification system is one of the blunders that put Twitter in the position where Threads could eat its lunch.

The problem with blue checkmark wasn’t that it was paid for verification. The problem was that there was no verification. You paid to be verified as anybody you’d like.

I’m no twitter owner, but to me the reasonable thing would be to put the name on the credit card on the account along with the checkmark.

That would scale for personal accounts, but not businesses. They could be charged extra and manually verified against national business registries.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#209

Post by kahnclusions » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 10:02 AM UTC

granzymes wrote: post #143

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…

It’s been downloaded close to 100 million times at this point and has blown past every growth record to date. I think it’s completely logical for every mainstream news site to mention it. I honestly can’t imagine a source like the New York Times not having an article. Twitter’s threatened lawsuit alone merited coverage.

It’s not surprising because they are promoting it with, for example, pop ups in Instagram about claiming your username. They already have a wide reach to promote the product.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#210

Post by epolanski » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 11:27 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #104

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…

HN is downright quiet on the topic, with only 21 posts over 20 comments since the launch (2023-07-05), 4 posts per day. Compare that to the Reddit blackout posts which seem to be closer to 8 posts per day. Only 8 posts with over 100 comments, whereas it's hard to find even a single Reddit blackout post at less than 100 comments. My friends in every other community are buzzing about Threads, but here on HN someone com…

Plain simply I think it is not that interesting of a topic to talk.

There isn't much to say.