How the new Threads app is made • Hacker News Board

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#211

Post by bawolff » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 11:35 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…

I don't know, i think this could be authentic. People have been mad at elon for a while now and there is a blood in the water - i think mainstream is interested in this drama and the new contender.

I think tech news is relatively quiet on this front because quite frankly, twitter is not that interesting as a product technically speaking. This is a political story not a technical one, and it ties into so many beats that are popular with the masses (e.g. the ultra rich being stupid and getting their comeuppance, increased influence of the far right with twitter being seen as a breeding ground, musk specifically being hated by a large segment of the population, etc).

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#212

Post by bawolff » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 11:45 AM UTC

hyperhopper wrote: post #113

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.

But why didn't those users just go to mastodon?

Honestly its amazing that as many people went with mastodon as they did.

Ideologically motivated (i.e. "federated-first") open source projects never succeed in attracting mainstream users. They have to make too many compromises, and inevitably prioritize their motivation (federation) over what is necessary to attract the mainstream (e.g. excellent UX).

The fact that mastadon is doing as well as it is, is sign number 1 that the market is begging for something like threads to happen.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#213

Post by londons_explore » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 11:55 AM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #63

londons_explore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All sorts of crap like facial recognition or object identification. Every bit of ML you can offload on your clients is one you don't have to pay for.

If one could profitably offload serverside CPU to the client then every app would be mining bitcoins on-device.

But it turns out that user complaints of a laggy app, hot phone and bad battery life (and therefore lost users and lost ad revenue) far outweigh any CPU time savings on the server.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#214

Post by wouldbecouldbe » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 11:59 AM UTC

Infinitesimus wrote: post #86

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #72

Honestly threads is so minimum. A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. Only thing complicated is scale. But meta has that in place. Threads team is a corporate cushion team.

> A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. > Only thing complicated is scale So, a solo dev cannot, in fact, pull this off.

One dev could replace the threads mobile team, no doubt.

I mean getting the API in order is the hard work.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#215

Post by wouldbecouldbe » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:03 PM UTC

yamazakiwi wrote: post #101

yeeetz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most Hacker News comment I've read today.

Reads to me like a Blind post by student.

No worked for corporates, startups etc. Both in small and big teams, and this is hugely unimpressive for 6 months with unlimited budget. It's not an existing project, but it's from scratch, so you dont have all the headaches or minor details.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#216

Post by PaulHoule » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:04 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #208

granzymes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aga…

The comparables on my mind are the EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates and the Legal Entity Identifier, both of which involve a lookup against business records for a corporation/LLC and have a sustainable cost of around $100 year.

EV failed in the marketplace. “No LEI, No Trade” made a lot of companies get an LEI but last time I looked it was widespread for companies to keep using their LEI without renewing it.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#217

Post by flagrant_taco » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:16 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #211

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…

I don't know, i think this could be authentic. People have been mad at elon for a while now and there is a blood in the water - i think mainstream is interested in this drama and the new contender. I think tech news is relatively quiet on this front because quite frankly, twitter is not that interesting as a product technically speaking. This is a political story not a technical one, and it ties into so many beats th…

Are people outside of the tech industry and Politics really concerned at all with Elon or Twitter?

My anecdotal experience is that the only people I interact with where this comes up are either people who seen to be parroting a story from 24 hour news or a techy that abandoned Twitter shortly after the purchase (many of have since whom quietly returned).

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#218

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:21 PM UTC

CaptainFever wrote: post #68

MisterSandman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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. Source? This seems like a really first-world country thing to say.

Even in some of the richest countries in the world, plenty of us are on metered phone contracts. OP acting like there isn't a cost of living crisis.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#219

Post by fidotron » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:22 PM UTC

Doesn’t the use of libgojni indicate using golang on the client? Which then might be shared in the big lump on iOS?

I’ve run into a few people that have actually deployed go on android in production. It works surprisingly well.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#220

Post by flagrant_taco » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:23 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #156

TheHappyOddish wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My less cynical viewpoint is that it just isn't that interesting. It's a bare-bones Twitter clone made by Meta. There's no interesting new technology to discuss, no open source angle, no discussion on the company founder that hasn't been done 100 times. HN has plenty of discussions about interesting Meta projects - Quest, React, the metaverse, financial discussions, etc. I just don't think there's much to grip people…

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

They've been stealing features from the competition for years. Snapchat was really novel when it came out, then the others created effectively the same UX. Clubhouse was a novel take as well, then Twitter added a clone of it right into the main app.

I can't actually think of the last time one of the existing networks launched a new app to compete rather than just stealing UX features, that is a new one to me for sure!