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How the new Threads app is made

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Re: How the new Threads app is made

#61
post #38

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.

Precisely. I had a friend who downloaded an app, but it was 2kb over the limit that he prefers to have all his apps! He promptly deleted it and left a scathing review. Naturally this picked up and a few other users refused to download the app.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#62
post #59

> Threads has one of the largest plugins we’ve ever seen. BarcelonaShareExtension is 81 MB. For context, the largest Instagram plugin - InstagramNotificationExtension is 23.5 MB. TheInstagramShareExtension is 5.6 MB Out of a 244.2 MB App on iOS.

Why the heck would they need an extension to share "Barcelona" Are we talking the whole city map or like wut

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Re: How the new Threads app is made

#63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#64

> Threads has one of the largest plugins we’ve ever seen. BarcelonaShareExtension is 81 MB. For context, the largest Instagram plugin - InstagramNotificationExtension is 23.5 MB. TheInstagramShareExtension is 5.6 MB Out of a 244.2 MB App on iOS.

“Just ship it already” … dependency bloat is not a valid complaint for a new product.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think leftists are really that associated with short-form writing, haven't you seen the jokes about "leftist memes"?[0] They were on Twitter because they left Tumblr, which was long-form. [0] the joke is they have pages of text on them

Tumblr leftism was much more contained though, it was hard to peer pressure targets and journalists outside the scene looking for easy stories had no ability to reproduce the gossip and slander.

Twitter's mechanics are a shouting competition, with 10% of users making up 90% of tweets, while giving users tremendous power over public figure's profiles. It turned leftist discourse into a more violent /r9k/ with a minority skin and corporate backing. I don't think the move towards a short-form platform had a non-trivial influence in this shift.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so even the makers of React are not dogfooding it anymore. Sounds about right.

s/React/React Native/ Pretty sure they're using it on web everywhere and IMHO that's a decent choice when you need state management / DOM updates. React Native is a whole other ball of mud, taking UI decisions out of the main thread where phones want them to be and delegating them into a bolted on javascript environment.

I was told they use mostly for the ad platform and slow as snail.

And FB performance degrading every month. I mostly use FB groups.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#67
post #38

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.

Really doubt the target users are gonna blame on this

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#68
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.

> 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.

Re: How the new Threads app is made

#70

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…

> They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows

Indeed, they have. How the heck do you find anything? On the web thingie I could find no search bar, to say nothing of the hashtags that have not been implemented (?!). And, somehow, there are people here taking their side on this. Like, what the heck, how can you launch a social media app in this day and age with almost no discoverability?

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