Shipping Threads in 5 months

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/threads-meta/

by hn1986 • 2 years ago

42 46 2 years ago

infoq.com

BhavdeepSethi• 2 years ago

TLDR; Reused Instagram code + infra and server driven UI.

cryptoz• 2 years ago

Yeah not sure how that is starting from 0.

Archonical• 2 years ago

0.999... to 1 development.

ulfw• 2 years ago

It isn't. Instagram logo and urls still show up in all kinds of random places. Moderation has been a disaster (my account got banned for a week twice for some random person not liking what I wrote. So that's not conducive to being a 'discussion' platform). And now I am starting to see tons of shit Russian bots ("0 Follower accounts with right wing views"). Same as Twitter really.

Spivak• 2 years ago

Given that the sum total of their four goals is a text based social network that is interoperable with the fediverse wouldn't the natural codebase to start from be Mastadon? I'm sure using IG came with a lot of benefits but given they had to punt on the fediverse interop, their most important thing outside of Threads working, starting with a base that speaks the protocol you want to adopt has got to count for something.

half-kh-hacker• 2 years ago

Speculatively, I think Mastodon being AGPL could have played some role here

cyberax• 2 years ago

Mastodon is not very scalable if you want to host tens of millions of users.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

More so given that Threads has goals of a billion users.

Very few companies other than Meta have experience in a scaling a platform to this extent.

And especially one that has the capabilities that scale along with it e.g. recommendation, trust & safety moderation etc.

light_hue_1• 2 years ago

I'm confused. Where's the postmortem on how Threads failed? Why is this talk structured like a victory lap?

In a time when users wanted to flee Twitter desperately, they could have launched a clone and likely won. Instead, they "kept it simple". They lacked even the most basic features, to the point where you signed up for Threads and found nothing at all which turned users away.

This is a talk about how to launch a successful app!? That seems totally disconnected from reality. No one should be learning any positive lessons from this.

_2d302• 2 years ago

Just looked at the Apple App store and it's #1 in the Free Apps ranking lol

petre3• 2 years ago

Of course it is. Meta likely paid Apple to rank it that way.

the_clarence2• 2 years ago

It's a huge success, you're just not paying attention. In terms of feature it's been getting better and better every week since launch. These guys can ship

yas_hmaheshwari• 2 years ago

On the business side, I am with you and I don't use Threads at all (or know anyone in my circle who does)

This talk is from a technical perspective - and whatever your thoughts on Threads are, it is a great technical feat to launch something of that scale in 5 months!

Can't think of any company that comes close to Meta in the speed of shipping features and products, and Threads app is the best example

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

In the 2000s the population of the internet, even though pretty mainstream by then, was still made up of enough proactive, deliberate, conscientious people to be able to trigger a MySpace to Facebook type migration.

On today's internet it's no longer possible. The full population is here and it's overall too passive and docile. The biggest sites won't be disrupted anymore. Twitter is certainly deprecated. But just like our uncles and grandparents will keep Facebook alive for 20 more years, so it will be with Twitter. Threads was never going to be able to change that.

boristsr2• 2 years ago

It's actually wildly successful and most companies would kill to have a social media platform with that level of success.

On the play store it's #2 in the charts ahead of ChatGPT, behind Temu.

Perhaps you need to rethink your definition of success and failure. It's objectively a successful platform launch.

petre3• 2 years ago

Sure. That's why Brazil fled to Bluesky instead of Threads when Twitter was blocked. It's probably successful among boomers and whoever already has another account with meta.

realprimoh• 2 years ago

This comment makes no sense. How has Threads failed? It's literally the #1 free app on the App Store right now and has been for a while.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

In the Q2 earnings call in July, Meta said that Threads had reached 200 MAU.

Which is about half of X which has seen declining growth and revenue since Musk took over.

So by every definition it has been very successful given how long it's been around.

gnabgib2• 2 years ago

I suspect you missed a multiplier.. K? M?

soperj• 2 years ago

A whole 200? Based on the the number of people I know who've ever used it (no one), I believe it.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

0->1

Except for the part where Meta used the immense network effects of Facebook and Instagram to repeatedly advertise Threads to their audience and harass them into trying it out.

This is more like slowing the 100->0 transition.

carabiner• 2 years ago

It's pretty bad. AOL for 2024. Absolutely braindead users though it's hyper-leftist (read: the anti-Twitter) if you're into that. Riddled with engagement spam and people posting generic questions ("what's a good restaurant in [city]") instead of googling.

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

Yes, I had to stop using it after most posts were basically complaining about Twitter and Elon. If I wanted to read about those topics, I'd, well, be on Twitter.

golergka• 2 years ago

Hyper-leftist is anti-twitter now? Last time I checked (about 2 minutes ago), twitter was hyper-leftist itself.

hackernewds• 2 years ago

Not to mention it was well timed with fury against Twitter. And there was (still is) no way to close your Threads account. And instant onboarding

leoh• 2 years ago

Haskell piece is fascinating. iirc, they have been using Haskell for many years for content moderation.

crabmusket• 2 years ago

Classic article on this: https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...

blahgeek• 2 years ago

I'm not impressed. I can totally imagine single person building the app under 5 months. Well, of course, it will not have the best UI or recommendation algorithm or marketing stuff, but I don't think those are in the critical path on the building of the app. I expected that a company like Meta can build apps like this in weeks.

It got me thinking that, in terms of building software 0 to 1, maybe the scalability of head count is surprisingly low.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

I expected that a company like Meta can build apps like this in weeks.

Why not a day?

fulafel• 2 years ago

Server side rendering:

One technique we use to tune the experience quickly was to make iteration in the product itself very easy. We did this using server driven UI. In a traditional client-server model, the client is responsible for everything about how the data is laid out on-screen. The server is just middleware pulling data out from stores. What we did was for the core interfaces which showed a list of posts, we instead sent down a full view model, which told the client exactly how to render it.
This meant that when we were experimenting on the call to action and the reply bar, or when and how we show different reply face files, we could do that with just a code change on the server, which only takes a couple of hours to roll out and takes effect on all platforms.
This let us iterate on the core Threading UI very quickly in the early days.

xnx• 2 years ago

6 months ago. 192 comments: https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/04/meta-threads-instagram-5-...

jsnell• 2 years ago

I think you meant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39987466

Shipping Threads in 5 months

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