Quick Thoughts on Threads
Threads launched late Wednesday night in North America, or early Thursday morning in the UK.1 I was a little late to the party because I was busy playing softball and eating dinner at the bar, so by the time I signed up things were flying around.
The quickest way I can describe it is: it's a party with really loud music. Everyone is shouting just to be heard. You can find a corner to have conversations with someone, but otherwise you'll be drowned out. In short, Threads is LOUD.
So here are some other quick first impressions I had about the new space to yell into the void.
Pleasing UI
I like the way Threads looks. Even their placeholder website that directs you to download the app is cool looking. They did a good job making this fun to use.
Algorithmic Feed
The feed is 100% driven by an algorithm. I don't know how it works, though it appears that it prioritizes people you follow float to the top - something you don't notice until you actually follow a decent amount of people. But Threads throws EVERYONE's posts2 into your feed. I saw a short explanation of the feed from a Meta employee - of course I can't find it now - but this is on purpose. It's a new app, and they want people to engage - so they want to provide content for you to make it enticing. I hope there is either a chronological feed, or a follower-only feed on the way.
An app to beat FOMO?
One of the issues I have - and I don't know if anyone else deals with this - is on Twitter, I feel like I have to "catch up". Scroll down to the last tweet I read, or if that's too much to handle, scroll back to earlier in the day to see what I missed. Basically, I have a slight fear of missing out. But with Threads, because it's serving you All The Posts, the minute you refresh, you get a brand new set of posts to read. When you open the app, you see the last post you started on, but it shows you an indicator that there are new posts - you tap the "up" arrow and it brings you to these new posts.
So I am learning to be OK with missing out on posts. They don't matter. But as a result, I don't see this platform as becoming a source for news like Twitter did. At least not now; it's way too busy, and things are all over the place. There's no "trending" tab so it's hard to see what is important to people in the moment.
I'm going to have some fun playing around with it and see how it goes. As with everything else I've been trying out, it's just another app to engage with other people. It's not replacing any other app...it's just another one.