Please report back in a week how many of them are posting more on Threads than Twitter. I saw something similar with signups, but content, not so much, not yet at least.
Have you seen Threads and Bluesky? Honestly the algorithm content they feed you makes Twitter look outstanding. Insane how poor it is, Bluesky has an excuse because they're starting from zero but IG has a decade of data on my account and its awful.
I thought the quotes on the BBC article were quite revealing:
> Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform "friendly... will ultimately be the key to its success".
> But Mr Musk responded: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
> If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
It will eventually be equally as toxic. Twitter started in a calm setting until the ads, politics, outrage filled it up. Threads will have ads soon and will apply the same Instagram algorithms it had before to promote verified outrage.
Trump is also on both Twitter and Threads. As long as he and other Instagram users are on Threads, then the outrage town hall will continue and will be no better than Twitter.
> Trump is also on both Twitter and Threads. As long as he and other Instagram users are on Threads, then the outrage town hall will continue and will be no better than Twitter.
I don't know, I'm in Europe, I follow zero explicitly political people yet US politics dominates my Twitter feed. I don't get that on Instagram which is all I need to make the service more enjoyable and to feel less toxic than Twitter. The outrage town hall will of course continue on Threads, but hopefully with only those who are activley seeking it.
> What will people talk about if Instagram is friendly
Anything that's not the current American culture wars? The same things most people talk about in their lives when not throthing at the mouth on Twitter. (i.e. comedy, sports, tech, food, animals, jobs, cars, etc.)
And, of course, culture wars will still be discussed, but it doesn't need promoting to those not interested in arguing such things on social media.
No anger or "jumping" (projecting much?), no misinformation - and nor a "sir" - but keep up the baseless drivel and assumption, toxic single-comment throwaway...
Can you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we eventually have to ban such accounts.
I've banned some of the other accounts who were posting flamebait stuff in this thread, because they didn't have much history and some look like serial trolls. I don't want to ban your account because it's been around for a while, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
Stating facts and citing sources isn't "posting flamewar comments" -- the only "flamewar" was the baseless trolling nonsense posted in the first place, so if you could actually bother to note context rather than jumping to making ridiculous threats, I'd be grateful.
"Another anonymous coward registering a throwaway to make baseless claims" isn't "stating facts and citing sources". It's just garden-variety internet attack/flamewar (ditto for "you have mock outrage", "projecting much?", "keep up the baseless drivel and assumption", and so on).
That sort of thing is not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. You can state facts and cite sources while remaining thoughtful and respectful, so please do that instead.
Edit: We've had to ask you about this more than once before:
Is that really true, though? All of the social media today was absolutely packed with all the stuff that everybody now says is absolutely toxic during its rapid growth phase. And users today often talk about how much better it was 10 years ago when it was still the wild west.
>>If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
Toxicity is Twitter's moat.
Its like people going to watch UFC fight, or boxing or something like that. Niceties aren't addictive. You need controversies, trolling and fighting all over to attract people.
That's why people go to Twitter. Not to post Birthday and Vacation pictures.
No one is really jumping from Twitter, we saw last week during the rate limit debacle that everyone who was shouting loudly about how great Bluesky was are all still addicted to Twitter.
There's going to be ActivityPub federation. You'll be able to have it your way, especially without the forced recommended posts in the feed, as soon as it launches.
AP federation just means you can spam your posts outside the Threads walled garden, eventually. It doesn't guarantee anything about how the native client will choose to show posts.
So, if the accounts are linked closely to each other, and an Instagram account is a necessity for a Threads "account", are those really "signups" or more like... logins into another view of the same service? These numbers seem overblown.
Yeah like Zuck said your Instagram followers are already there - so the question is: if you gain a follower on threads, is it also a new follower on Instagram?
AFAIK, no. Your Instagram followers also aren't already there, FWIW: when you first log in it asks if you want to follow some or all of the same people you follow on Instagram; if you follow someone who isn't on Threads yet it becomes a "Pending" follow and will automatically follow them once they join. I am pretty sure the follow lists are then disjoint.
(There actually seems to be a bug in this whole scheme btw wherein there is a window during the onboarding where your account is Private and if people follow you during that moment they become Requested follows you have to Confirm even if your account is immediately public and is swarmed with hundred of followers. I thankfully noticed and dug out this stragglers.)
The users and accounts are definitely otherwise the same, though: you can't even AFAIK sign up in the Threads app... you can only log in using an existing Instagram account that is already logged in on that same device, which seems to just use shared keychain access to the login tokens from the other app. I had an old version of Instagram installed and realized I couldn't even log in to Threads until I upgraded it.
It is, they make it super easy to appropriate that into threads and will no doubt do even more over time up to and including, I suspect, creating threads accounts for all Insta users and promoting threads content to Insta users and vice versa.
As I mentioned elsewhere, does the conversation "Okay it's just using the Insta login service just now but I'll have its own one ready next week" "nah fuckit, just ship it, it's fine like that" sound likely or indeed familiar to you?
By that logic, when you create an account for some website through your Gmail you're not creating an account.
Threads still takes you through the expected signup loop of adding bio/description, finding follows and what not. It's just missing an email verification because it goes through IG.
You're still giving users and money to Meta, which is probably gonna try use threads to do an EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) on the Fediverse (Group of server software like Mastodon and Lemmy which are able to talk between each other, mastodon is probably the better twitter alternative, just try not to join the biggest instances and join a smaller one, experience is better)
True, I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, I just wanted to see what it was like. I used one of the apple hide-my-emails just in case I didn't want anything to do anything with it. From what I can see, threads doesn't use hashtags, which is a little confusing.
I did give mastodon a go, but I found it confusing, when I make account is that for that specific instance? If I choose one instance, can I see things from a different instance?
> when I make account is that for that specific instance? If I choose one instance, can I see things from a different instance?
>> When you first create your account, you choose a server — similar to how you choose to open an email account on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or wherever — which generates your profile’s address. So, for example, if you sign up for Mastodon via the climate justice server, then your address will be @[your username]@climatejustice.social. But no matter which server you sign up with, you will be able to communicate with users from any other server, just like how Gmail users email Hotmail users and vice versa. However, some servers might have blocked other servers (perhaps if it’s an unsavory group), which would mean you can’t communicate with anyone from the blocked server.
EEE is not really relevant here, they're not "embracing" fediverse at all. it's a completely separate app. they just vaguely claimed they would in the future.
Microsoft is the only company that i know of with a true EEE approach eg with Java
I get the feeling that this is a skunkworks project for Meta. The fact that it's completely blocked in the European Union suggests that either they're doing something really bad (worse than Facebook), or they don't have the resources allocated to this project for their lawyers to greenlight it. And it just being a product built on top of the Instagram database would also fit in with that idea.
it seem like the Irish Authority isn't happy at all with the way the data is "commingled" with Instagram.
Could the fact that deleting the Threads account will also remove the Instagram one be connected to having this Threads thingy appear as a part/feature of Instagram instead of a self-standing platform?
Meta will nuke your Instagram account for basically anything, including for no reason at all.
I have like 50 followers, 10 photos, and check my IG once every week or two - haven't posted anything in months.
Meta has banned me twice for unspecified policy violations (both times I had to send them a selfie and got reinstated, and there was no way to ask a human what these policies were).
I suspect they'll ban/unban me again someday, oh well, it's Meta and I don't care, I just make sure not to use them for anything essential...!
If you've uploaded photos of yourself on other services and those services have agreements among themselves to share each others' (anonymized?) data, then you can be tracked across services through, among other things, your photos.
> If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.
Right, it's not like they gather location data and insist on real world names or buy data from brokers or use cookies. Facial recognition is the missing piece of in the puzzle!
> If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.
It's not like governments have databases with photo identification.
I think they want selfies to enforce a one-account-per-person policy, to limit scraping. They already enforce phone verification, but there's plenty of ways around that (e.g. services that redirect verification SMS from hacked phones, or just buy phone-verified accounts from someone else). Facial recognition raises the bar and gives them extra confidence that two accounts are unrelated even if they have similar IPs/access patterns/whatever
For this reason I decided to give up Instagram completely -- my account was flagged for whatever reason that I cannot possibly understand, and I would rather not use the service than give them my selfie
> Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link.
>
> Garbage service.
As long as you(and others) keep using it, theres really no reason for them not to
about the same option I have not to have linkedin, "its where my career networks".
Does it have some kind of opportunity cost? it probably does. I know people that got exciting job offers that would not have happened had they not been on linkedin, so I would guess I have lost out to some. Its the price I pay. Not going on linkedin
Is it possible you're using some ad/JS-blocker or DNS blacklist, and Meta's silly tools are interpreting that as proof of a headless scraping client?
So far that's the best theory for why Reddit recently plunged my 13-year account into Kafkaesque censored limbo. And then did it again after a month of seeking answers on another account.
Probably on of the tools you post it too _or posted it in_ runs a web-scrapper.
And there might be a person specific id in the link you get, which other people copying the image don't get.
For example edge did for a while scrap any link you visited with it, even if you logged out of exactly this feature, not running any heuristics about weather it might a a magic link and then skipping it and AFIK also not stripping query parameters (through it did respect robots.txt I think).
Similar a lot of apps do similar, sometimes not even respecting robots.txt.
Through in any case it's still Meta being rediculous, because it's a known issue and you can't fault your user for doing perfectly normal things in a world where even one of the major browsers behaves like malicious spyware wrt. urls/web scrapping without user explicit consent.
> And there might be a person specific id in the link you get
This is how they know I'm doing it, each url seems to be custom generated for the specific view of the post from an account because they actually expire too eventually. But you know "scraping" is like sharing what? 15 image links off the walled garden a month?
Just think it's an insane amount of effort to go to for them to try to make the internet stop working like the internet.
Upsets me this is where we got to with image sharing vs the open and remix culture of pre-yahoo Tumblr.
Oh that's interesting. Occasionally I use the Firefox inspector to view an image directly. I don't have the eyes of a 20 year old anymore and Instagram doesn't have a full screen button or any other way to enlarge an image.
Maybe they're picking up on that somehow and getting ornery about it.
IG was an app before they were a website and they have never embraced the open architecture of the web, nor been entirely comfortable with the browser as a user agent.
That raises another interesting topic, the US DoJ is becoming increasingly aggressive about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act toward websites. I wonder how well IG complies with the relevant standards like WCAG. Probably not well. We have noticed that any website which implements a lot of anti-user features tends to be extra bad in terms of accessibility for the disabled. I wonder if we will at some point see a Big Tech like Meta start to come under fire from the US government because their user-hostile features are also hostile toward the disabled and/or this results in them skirting ADA compliance.
I had the same experience. I barely use it but somewhat active mostly follow friends. Post a picture of food mainly. And one day banned/blocked for no reason other than some vague violation. Stupid selfie to unlock.
They banned my account that I have never posted anyting with less than a month after I created it for violating community guidelines. The message told me it was final and I had no way to appeal the decision. Apparently not posting anything can be a violation of their community guidelines.
They just want your government id. It makes their data set more valuable to advertisers. So the extort it out of you after you're partly invested in the platform. The security thing is just cover.
That is why they often demand your phone number later too. If the demanded it during signup you'd know the deal you were making and would probably back out. So they do it after you're invested so you have something to lose instead of them.
Had this too the other day. I am 100% certain that the ban is just a ploy to force you to give them more personal data. In my case it was a phone number, next up maybe a selfie.
its clear Meta are trying quite hard to piggyback Threads off the more palatable brand of Instagram rather than Facebook. However ultimately it's all still the same company, the same data mining and ad/influencing platform.
It's an interesting strategy, the app on the Apple App Store is published by "Instagram Inc" rather than Meta, prominently named as "Threads, an Instagram App". They could have launched it as a completely separate brand, but that would have required marketing such as "the new app from Meta", and everyone more closely associates Meta with Facebook.
It's quite surprising they never launched a microblogging network before, but I suppose they have never really launched a new network, only ever acquired them... does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
Well this is an alternative to Twitter, a company which lied about needing phone numbers for 2FA and then used them for targeted ads.
> does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
It shows they are trying to capitalize on Twitter’s dumpster fire, and for the first time there is a mainstream competitor. Sorry Mastodon. Every time Twitter bugs out, people will go to Threads. Some may never go back to Twitter.
Might take quite a while. Bluesky is currently only at 266k registered users and there were already some scaling issues when Twitter introduced the rate limits. Although I think they now have improved the way that the service can be scaled up based on demand.
I still can't believe it's app-only, that there's no desktop version. I refuse to wall off parts of the internet into silos that I have to enter through downloadable portals.
It seems like it’s going to eventually have activitypub / mastodon support? I’m hoping I can just follow everyone from Threads in my existing mastodon app. (Or from the webui of the instance I use)
Lots of instances are anti-meta integration. But imo the protocol is open specifically for this kinda thing. I don’t have to use Facebook’s garbage, but I can still get content from people who do.
It will only have activitypub/mastodon till it is the number 1 player...
At that point, suddenly the activitypub feeds will start mysteriously getting unreliable/ratelimited and eventually support will be dropped and it'll be back to a silo.
You only build the walls high after you have captured everyone...
internet applications which have no web app have been a thing for much longer than web apps have been a thing, what a weird thing to take a stand against.
This is an intentional strategy to work around ad-blocking and other data harvesting practices. Just take a look at the privacy information screen in the iOS App Store for example.
All other platforms allow users to block ads and other malware on its platform. iOS is the only one that is actively anti-hacker. That's the difference.
I'm using "hacker" to refer to its original, broader meaning as a term, not the meaning pop media uses. Similar to the way how this site "Hacker News" is for all kinds of "hackers" in general, not just infosec crackers.
I assume they wanted to ship ASAP and didn’t want to build something on every platform at once. They’re capitalizing on Twitter’s dumpster fire, what’s important is getting a product out there that 1) replicates basic Twitter functionality and 2) millions of people can easily access.
It shows a blank page on Firefox, though displays as it should on Edge/Chrome. I guess they simply haven't considered deploying for non-Chromium engines yet.
Much as I despise Meta, I have to say that the article doesn't really say the same thing as the headline and it appears to be pure clickbait to me. Compare:
> Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile
with
> Meta explains: “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
The title seems to imply that a user deleting their Threads profile may more-or-less inadvertently delete their Instagram account. This is not supported by the quote from Meta, and there is no indication that there's any procedure to initiate deletion of the Threads profile which would then trigger the Instagram deletion. An accurate headline would be, for example, «Meta will delete your Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account». Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.
The distinction is around intent. The parent's phrasing makes it seem as if its done for technical reasons (e.g. your threads profile and Instagram profile are actually the same thing) while the headline makes it seem like a business choice.
One says that if your intent is to delete your Threads profile the only way to do so is to delete your Instagram account. The second implies (unsupported) that there's a way to delete your Threads profile that a user might not understand will also delete your Instagram account.
Those aren't the same propositions (I'm not sure they even are propositions?) so there is no such logical relationship.
"Meta will nuke your account" and "you nuke your account" is different. It might not even be possible to perform one of these (nuking your thread profile).
Your Instagram account is deleted (the state not the action) iff your thread profile is deleted.
Your thread profile is deleted iff your Instagram is deleted.
Those are the propositions that are logically equivalent.
Read them back carefully - they're two different sides of a coin. One is talking about deleting your Threads account, the other is about deleting your Instagram account.
> Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.
I think you're reading too much into it. "Shitty user-hostile behaviour" would be "Muahahahaha, if anyone ever wants to get rid of their Threads account they must also *delete their Instagram account*, hahahaha, the world is MINE! MINE, I TELL YOU!" <fx: thunder crash, up grams dramatic music>
Is that scenario more or less likely than "fuck it, just use the Insta signup server for auth, we need to ship something *today*" "yeah okay, that'll take me ten minutes"?
I don't know. I think that users being able to harmlessly deactivate their Threads account but not delete their profile is evidence against that hypothesis. Surely the ability to delete something is one of the most basic features? All the more so if Threads just depends on Instagram for auth.
My bet is that the decision to not allow the user to delete only their Threads profile has been fully intentional. The last thing Meta wants is for the fleeting users who quickly jumped on the latest Threads fad to eventually delete their profile once they become bored. That would be embarrassing to Threads and reduce its sticking power if it were a common enough phenomenon. Much better for them to keep the users' content hostage under their desire to keep their Instagram account.
Its absolutely this and I am shocked at the amount of people coming to the defense of Meta here, like, its not users' jobs to figure that a new app is actually the old app but in a different skin, and merely saying "an Instagram app" wasn't clear enough in obviating it was the same social media account. That's on Meta, not on users.
threads has always been heavily advertised with its Instagram integration. the app is called "threads, an Instagram app" and the onboarding flow itself is based on your existing insta follows. you can disagree with this strategy but it's definitely not unintuitive or unnecessary, they make it extremely clear
There is no threads account. There is no way to make a threads account. You sign in with ig. Threads really appears to be a subset of barebones and stripped down ig. Calling it a marriage of accounts seems misleading, it’s really just another Instagram client with rebooted follow list, that only lets you see posts from the new client.
The article title is absolutely written in a misleading and inflammatory way to sort of imply, without outright lying, that someone might run into a screen that causes them to accidentally delete their Instagram account. (I get a different title in yc and tc, not sure if tc is showing multiple headlines to different people depending on factors.)
The “The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users” line in the article is one of those staples of modern journalism where they take a couple tweets or threads now, and make them out to be prevailing sentiment. Cite your sources on who is surprised TechCrunch.
Since Threads is a separate app and logging in with Instagram was effectively a form of single sign on, it will be interesting to see how long this lasts.
It is unacceptable because it’s entirely intentional and avoidable, and in no way a best practice that benefits the users but instead the platform.
For the non technical - It’s interesting that a new profile can be generated from an Instagram account but all those fields are intentionally not being made to be removed.
Arguably, Mastodon is also problematic from a GDPR perspective as ActivityPub doesn't offer a way to control data once it has left the instance (which is the entire point of federation). But something tells me Meta didn't have to hold off on publishing Threads in the EU because it uses ActivityPub. And this account merging may indeed also be in violation.
> ActivityPub doesn't offer a way to control data once it has left the instance
Nothing offers a way to control data once you post it publicly though? You could host a public mastodon with federation off and the amount of data exposed is not really going to be different than if you federate.
Completely tangential to the article itself, TechCrunch's privacy controls are also extremely user hostile.
First it prompts you with the usual consent banner but of course doesn't provide a button to refuse all unless you click through to a second screen (this is in violation of the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines btw, the "reject all" button needs to be front and center and must be given as much weight as an "accept all" button if present).
Then it shows me the article but the article embeds something (presumably a tweet or a Facebook post or something else) and tells me "To view this this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Click here to do so.". So instead of letting me decide in place that I want to agree to that one embed or even all embeds from the same source, I have to go somewhere else. And I don't even know what I'm missing out on and of course there's no direct link to whatever is being included either.
Finally if I click the link it takes me to a page with a big toggle switch that asks me to agree to all social advertising partners. Not just social networks either, most of these are just advertising and analytics. And I can't pick and choose either, I have to give a blanket consent without being informed of the details and purposes, which, again, blatantly violates the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines.
I'm not pointing out that these are in violation because I think US companies should be beholden to EU law. I'm pointing this out because it demonstrates how blatantly user hostile this is.
A family member of mine had 4000+ posts of their art on their instagram, with quite a few followers, and one day the account just got nuked. That's it, not even a message beyond "broke policies".
Ignore that dude. This "you're not paying for it" bullshit needs to end. Yes, we are paying for it. We are paying with our attention and our sharecropping labor. We give them a mind to infect and they sell that to advertisers. We give them our content and they use that to attract other minds to sell to advertisers. Any suggestion that those aren't a valuable payments shows a complete lack of understanding of the last 20 years of online "progress" and also just makes them look foolish.
Since FB this spring deleted my account since 16 years for no reason (that they would say) I have to my surprise experienced a kind of freedom, a calm serenity. After the initial feeling of being insulted and shut out from my circle of friends and family through no fault of mine I have gradually come to realize a few things:
1. there are other, better ways to stay in contact with with people I care about than through group messages and posts (which is actually an insidious sort of indirect messaging when you think about it).
2. as users of these mega-services we are largely like puppets on a string, victims of the latest fads among governments and advertisers.
3. Meta is, and always was, an unethical service that profits off the wide dissemination of our most private information. And profiting off pure scams, for example those that target poor and naive people with promises of untold riches through crypto schemes as testified by various celebrities (that have had their pictures stolen). [0]
We are nearing the point where we can, nay should, en masse desert these manipulative megaservices like Meta, Twitter, Youtube et al. They represented a certain phase in the history of internet, and as all things, their hegemonies must come to an end. We can for example willfully trigger the algorithms that shut our accounts down, as it is just about the only statement we are left with.
For the sake of our own serene peace of mind if nothing else.
> We are nearing the point where we can, nay should, en masse desert these manipulative megaservices like Meta, Twitter, Youtube et al
You're right, but, ironically, that's why this new products exists.
CIA and NSA needs twitter and when Elon pulled the plug, they just found another provider.
Facebook is a glorified address book. The things we value the most on there are our connections, which is something we've always managed to do before the internet.
People clutching their pearls on social media need to stop.
That's great and all, but my kids daycare posts photos on a private Facebook channel. Oh and birthday parties come in on Facebook. And I sold stuff on Facebook marketplace that I wasn't able to sell ok craigslist.
It's just a useful ubiquitous app. You can use the features you like. I don't see what the point of taking such an absolutist stance decrying the app as evil. Im just trying to raise a few kids, go to some parties and sell some junk around the house
At whom? You, your friends and family are the ones who chose to make this the method. If most people didn't have Facebook accounts, it wouldn't be the default for these things.
Didn't facebook get away with doing that exact thing with whatsapp? They promised not to combine the phone number data with their other data and did exactly that. Maybe they got a slap on the wrist fine.
Yeah, it'd be good if the governments that had issues with it changed their position to require divestment of WhatsApp after facebook pulled that shit.
Pity that didn't happen, so yeah... they got away with it. :(
Meta nuked my wife's private instagram account for no reason. It had a bunch of photos, a bunch of friends, and a bunch of direct messages. How on earth did this even register, I have no idea. We appealed and they graciously let her back in.
I am facing an inverse of this situation. I have long deleted Instagram account, and when I try to give Threads a try, it told me to "Login via Instagram". Sure, I could create another account for Instagram and Threads, but given that I cannot reuse my username as per Meta's policy, I'm not willing to give it a try until I can come to terms that I won't be able to use my original username and move on
Not everyone is okay with it but the only way past it is regulating the tech sector and HN specifically is VERY against that, Republicans are against regulation that doesn't constrain the freedoms of people who aren't acceptable to religious fundamentalists, and Democrats seem to only care about preventing a progressive party from ever existing.
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[ 322 ms ] story [ 7554 ms ] thread> Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform "friendly... will ultimately be the key to its success".
> But Mr Musk responded: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
It will eventually be equally as toxic. Twitter started in a calm setting until the ads, politics, outrage filled it up. Threads will have ads soon and will apply the same Instagram algorithms it had before to promote verified outrage.
Trump is also on both Twitter and Threads. As long as he and other Instagram users are on Threads, then the outrage town hall will continue and will be no better than Twitter.
I don't know, I'm in Europe, I follow zero explicitly political people yet US politics dominates my Twitter feed. I don't get that on Instagram which is all I need to make the service more enjoyable and to feel less toxic than Twitter. The outrage town hall will of course continue on Threads, but hopefully with only those who are activley seeking it.
Anything that's not the current American culture wars? The same things most people talk about in their lives when not throthing at the mouth on Twitter. (i.e. comedy, sports, tech, food, animals, jobs, cars, etc.)
And, of course, culture wars will still be discussed, but it doesn't need promoting to those not interested in arguing such things on social media.
I've banned some of the other accounts who were posting flamebait stuff in this thread, because they didn't have much history and some look like serial trolls. I don't want to ban your account because it's been around for a while, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
That sort of thing is not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. You can state facts and cite sources while remaining thoughtful and respectful, so please do that instead.
Edit: We've had to ask you about this more than once before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850557 (Dec 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33850484 (Dec 2022)
and you've unfortunately been continuing the same pattern in other recent threads (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36338416). As I said already, I don't want to ban you, but if you don't stop posting like this, we're going to have to—so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Toxicity is Twitter's moat.
Its like people going to watch UFC fight, or boxing or something like that. Niceties aren't addictive. You need controversies, trolling and fighting all over to attract people.
That's why people go to Twitter. Not to post Birthday and Vacation pictures.
(There actually seems to be a bug in this whole scheme btw wherein there is a window during the onboarding where your account is Private and if people follow you during that moment they become Requested follows you have to Confirm even if your account is immediately public and is swarmed with hundred of followers. I thankfully noticed and dug out this stragglers.)
The users and accounts are definitely otherwise the same, though: you can't even AFAIK sign up in the Threads app... you can only log in using an existing Instagram account that is already logged in on that same device, which seems to just use shared keychain access to the login tokens from the other app. I had an old version of Instagram installed and realized I couldn't even log in to Threads until I upgraded it.
Apparently this also spams them with an invite, which may be unpopular.
Which seems like a misstep because now my "Threads" account has 10% of the followers of my IG/Twitter.
Threads still takes you through the expected signup loop of adding bio/description, finding follows and what not. It's just missing an email verification because it goes through IG.
I did give mastodon a go, but I found it confusing, when I make account is that for that specific instance? If I choose one instance, can I see things from a different instance?
>> When you first create your account, you choose a server — similar to how you choose to open an email account on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or wherever — which generates your profile’s address. So, for example, if you sign up for Mastodon via the climate justice server, then your address will be @[your username]@climatejustice.social. But no matter which server you sign up with, you will be able to communicate with users from any other server, just like how Gmail users email Hotmail users and vice versa. However, some servers might have blocked other servers (perhaps if it’s an unsavory group), which would mean you can’t communicate with anyone from the blocked server.
>> https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/08/what-is-mastodon/
Microsoft is the only company that i know of with a true EEE approach eg with Java
It just bolsters the fact that I'm not install threads, ever.
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-...
it seem like the Irish Authority isn't happy at all with the way the data is "commingled" with Instagram. Could the fact that deleting the Threads account will also remove the Instagram one be connected to having this Threads thingy appear as a part/feature of Instagram instead of a self-standing platform?
I have like 50 followers, 10 photos, and check my IG once every week or two - haven't posted anything in months.
Meta has banned me twice for unspecified policy violations (both times I had to send them a selfie and got reinstated, and there was no way to ask a human what these policies were).
I suspect they'll ban/unban me again someday, oh well, it's Meta and I don't care, I just make sure not to use them for anything essential...!
Also a great dataset for "AI" training, so your face can appear in modified form in laundered pictures.
When it will be enforced ...
How on earth does facial recognition help with tracking someone across the web?
If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.
Right, it's not like they gather location data and insist on real world names or buy data from brokers or use cookies. Facial recognition is the missing piece of in the puzzle!
> If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.
It's not like governments have databases with photo identification.
"Welcome back Jim!"
Opened the app last week and had to click through an accept gate warning me if I keep using "Scraping tools" I'll lose my account.
The only "scraping" I've been doing is copying the direct image links and posting them to slack and my bookmarking service a few times a month.
Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link.
Garbage service.
As long as you(and others) keep using it, theres really no reason for them not to
Does it have some kind of opportunity cost? it probably does. I know people that got exciting job offers that would not have happened had they not been on linkedin, so I would guess I have lost out to some. Its the price I pay. Not going on linkedin
So far that's the best theory for why Reddit recently plunged my 13-year account into Kafkaesque censored limbo. And then did it again after a month of seeking answers on another account.
And there might be a person specific id in the link you get, which other people copying the image don't get.
For example edge did for a while scrap any link you visited with it, even if you logged out of exactly this feature, not running any heuristics about weather it might a a magic link and then skipping it and AFIK also not stripping query parameters (through it did respect robots.txt I think).
Similar a lot of apps do similar, sometimes not even respecting robots.txt.
Through in any case it's still Meta being rediculous, because it's a known issue and you can't fault your user for doing perfectly normal things in a world where even one of the major browsers behaves like malicious spyware wrt. urls/web scrapping without user explicit consent.
This is how they know I'm doing it, each url seems to be custom generated for the specific view of the post from an account because they actually expire too eventually. But you know "scraping" is like sharing what? 15 image links off the walled garden a month?
Just think it's an insane amount of effort to go to for them to try to make the internet stop working like the internet.
Upsets me this is where we got to with image sharing vs the open and remix culture of pre-yahoo Tumblr.
But you are using scraping tools? Why the quotes?
Or maybe I misunderstood and you are manually copying?
Maybe they're picking up on that somehow and getting ornery about it.
IG was an app before they were a website and they have never embraced the open architecture of the web, nor been entirely comfortable with the browser as a user agent.
That raises another interesting topic, the US DoJ is becoming increasingly aggressive about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act toward websites. I wonder how well IG complies with the relevant standards like WCAG. Probably not well. We have noticed that any website which implements a lot of anti-user features tends to be extra bad in terms of accessibility for the disabled. I wonder if we will at some point see a Big Tech like Meta start to come under fire from the US government because their user-hostile features are also hostile toward the disabled and/or this results in them skirting ADA compliance.
They promise to delete images within 30 days (yeah they may delete images, but for sure not the metadata).
That is why they often demand your phone number later too. If the demanded it during signup you'd know the deal you were making and would probably back out. So they do it after you're invested so you have something to lose instead of them.
It's an interesting strategy, the app on the Apple App Store is published by "Instagram Inc" rather than Meta, prominently named as "Threads, an Instagram App". They could have launched it as a completely separate brand, but that would have required marketing such as "the new app from Meta", and everyone more closely associates Meta with Facebook.
It's quite surprising they never launched a microblogging network before, but I suppose they have never really launched a new network, only ever acquired them... does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
> does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
It shows they are trying to capitalize on Twitter’s dumpster fire, and for the first time there is a mainstream competitor. Sorry Mastodon. Every time Twitter bugs out, people will go to Threads. Some may never go back to Twitter.
Wait, I thought it's supposed to be Bluesky? Three months ago they were totally probably maybe going to incinerate Twitter.
Lots of instances are anti-meta integration. But imo the protocol is open specifically for this kinda thing. I don’t have to use Facebook’s garbage, but I can still get content from people who do.
At that point, suddenly the activitypub feeds will start mysteriously getting unreliable/ratelimited and eventually support will be dropped and it'll be back to a silo.
You only build the walls high after you have captured everyone...
I think privacy is bigger issue here.
If you believe that, I'd like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. It will eventually have activitypub too!
anti-hacker? I think on the hierarchical scale of hackers, people who download and deploy adblockers should be rated "script kiddy" :)
Hell I know someone who bought one of those Samsung foldable phones so that he could ditch his laptop.
https://www.threads.net/@zuck
Is the website read-only or something?
I suppose this is so it can, like Twitter, be shared and embedded elsewhere for reference.
There is no general landing page if you go to threads.net.
> Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile
with
> Meta explains: “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
The title seems to imply that a user deleting their Threads profile may more-or-less inadvertently delete their Instagram account. This is not supported by the quote from Meta, and there is no indication that there's any procedure to initiate deletion of the Threads profile which would then trigger the Instagram deletion. An accurate headline would be, for example, «Meta will delete your Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account». Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.
Meta will delete Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account
and
Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile
mean exactly the same. In fact they are logically the same. It's like A iff B, means the same as B iff A.
> Meta will nuke your Instagram account
> exactly the same
"Meta will nuke your account" and "you nuke your account" is different. It might not even be possible to perform one of these (nuking your thread profile).
Your Instagram account is deleted (the state not the action) iff your thread profile is deleted.
Your thread profile is deleted iff your Instagram is deleted.
Those are the propositions that are logically equivalent.
I think you're reading too much into it. "Shitty user-hostile behaviour" would be "Muahahahaha, if anyone ever wants to get rid of their Threads account they must also *delete their Instagram account*, hahahaha, the world is MINE! MINE, I TELL YOU!" <fx: thunder crash, up grams dramatic music>
Is that scenario more or less likely than "fuck it, just use the Insta signup server for auth, we need to ship something *today*" "yeah okay, that'll take me ten minutes"?
My bet is that the decision to not allow the user to delete only their Threads profile has been fully intentional. The last thing Meta wants is for the fleeting users who quickly jumped on the latest Threads fad to eventually delete their profile once they become bored. That would be embarrassing to Threads and reduce its sticking power if it were a common enough phenomenon. Much better for them to keep the users' content hostage under their desire to keep their Instagram account.
Throw enough highly paid engineers at it and it will take 10 months.
Also, note the word “should”.
The relevant bit is the completely non-intuitive (and one could assume unnecessary) marriage of the two profiles.
As written, it seems to be completely wrong.
The article title is absolutely written in a misleading and inflammatory way to sort of imply, without outright lying, that someone might run into a screen that causes them to accidentally delete their Instagram account. (I get a different title in yc and tc, not sure if tc is showing multiple headlines to different people depending on factors.)
The “The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users” line in the article is one of those staples of modern journalism where they take a couple tweets or threads now, and make them out to be prevailing sentiment. Cite your sources on who is surprised TechCrunch.
For the user though threads is a separate app.
And the login is a form of single sign on.
It is unacceptable because it’s entirely intentional and avoidable, and in no way a best practice that benefits the users but instead the platform.
For the non technical - It’s interesting that a new profile can be generated from an Instagram account but all those fields are intentionally not being made to be removed.
Nothing offers a way to control data once you post it publicly though? You could host a public mastodon with federation off and the amount of data exposed is not really going to be different than if you federate.
https://social.network.europa.eu/about
First it prompts you with the usual consent banner but of course doesn't provide a button to refuse all unless you click through to a second screen (this is in violation of the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines btw, the "reject all" button needs to be front and center and must be given as much weight as an "accept all" button if present).
Then it shows me the article but the article embeds something (presumably a tweet or a Facebook post or something else) and tells me "To view this this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Click here to do so.". So instead of letting me decide in place that I want to agree to that one embed or even all embeds from the same source, I have to go somewhere else. And I don't even know what I'm missing out on and of course there's no direct link to whatever is being included either.
Finally if I click the link it takes me to a page with a big toggle switch that asks me to agree to all social advertising partners. Not just social networks either, most of these are just advertising and analytics. And I can't pick and choose either, I have to give a blanket consent without being informed of the details and purposes, which, again, blatantly violates the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines.
I'm not pointing out that these are in violation because I think US companies should be beholden to EU law. I'm pointing this out because it demonstrates how blatantly user hostile this is.
US companies doing business in the EU should be and are beholden to the EU law.
1. there are other, better ways to stay in contact with with people I care about than through group messages and posts (which is actually an insidious sort of indirect messaging when you think about it).
2. as users of these mega-services we are largely like puppets on a string, victims of the latest fads among governments and advertisers.
3. Meta is, and always was, an unethical service that profits off the wide dissemination of our most private information. And profiting off pure scams, for example those that target poor and naive people with promises of untold riches through crypto schemes as testified by various celebrities (that have had their pictures stolen). [0]
We are nearing the point where we can, nay should, en masse desert these manipulative megaservices like Meta, Twitter, Youtube et al. They represented a certain phase in the history of internet, and as all things, their hegemonies must come to an end. We can for example willfully trigger the algorithms that shut our accounts down, as it is just about the only statement we are left with.
For the sake of our own serene peace of mind if nothing else.
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/facebook-pulls-out-all-sto...
You're right, but, ironically, that's why this new products exists. CIA and NSA needs twitter and when Elon pulled the plug, they just found another provider.
People clutching their pearls on social media need to stop.
If an address book is a slot machine that dispenses anxiety, shitty memes, and unwanted attention from your worst uncle.
It's just a useful ubiquitous app. You can use the features you like. I don't see what the point of taking such an absolutist stance decrying the app as evil. Im just trying to raise a few kids, go to some parties and sell some junk around the house
None of these things should require selling your soul or firstborn rights to Facebook, right? But somehow it does, and we should be angry at this.
Might be some anti-trust interest in this. :)
Pity that didn't happen, so yeah... they got away with it. :(
1. You've trapped people who don't want Threads on Threads, where they can complain about it.
2. And meanwhile people curious about Threads can't try it because they don't want to be stuck having it.
Let's see how it works out.
This has become common in social media. And we seem to be ok with it.
It's clearly a very fucked up thing. The only time I ever saw it irl was from a legit crazy person.
So are we all crazy now?