It's kinda awkward that they insist on that 100 mil in 5 days number when they compare to apps that didn't have the half world available to aggressively advertise to for free.
Pretty sure there was (and still is) a very obvious button in Instagram, they didn't spend money on advertising is what I understood.
At 1.2 billion monthly users that's a pretty average CTR for that kind of thing. A little extra because threads still isn't available worldwide so some traffic was just lost.
> they didn't spend money on advertising is what I understood
They didn't have to, though - the news outlets were running stories on Threads and its impending arrival nearly every day. To claim, as GP does, it was entirely "organic" is nonsense.
It's actually okay-ish so far. The people and the news are still on twitter but with the bots (twitter) and Facebook support (infrastructure, integration with existing fb products and the leaner upselling) I can see that it does have a good product market fit
Honestly, I can't believe any real person still uses Twitter. I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers. Nevertheless, whenever I open it, I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content. I'm not saying it's the only content I see, but enough to make Twitter look like the front page of a terrorist organization. Apparently, the Twitter algorithm has learned that I'm using it to look up political tweets from time to time by following links, and adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions than I would ever endorse or want to see.
> I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers.
That's your problem, right here. The social graph is the strongest signal there is.
Try following the people that are more interesting to you and your recommendations will vastly improve. Or don't, and just come to the Fediverse and use a nitter frontend for the occasional twitter link.
You’re not wrong. The FYP, at least for my unused account, is garbage tier. Hell, the latest phenomenon it has picked up on is meme pages used to advertise OnlyFans and gambling, and outright pornography and porn ads. Some of the worst human beings are on there spreading ideas about race theory. Responses to anything vaguely popular are filled with blue check marks either trying to make money with engagement bait, or clout chasing by reply spam.
But Twitter allows you to curate your graph with the Following tab way better. There are enough sub-communities and funny people for it to still work.
And all recommendation algorithms are vulnerable. Thread’s head honcho had to release a statement because the recommendation algorithm on Threads became awful over the holiday period. And they aggressively want you on the FYP!
I dunno about anyone else but TikTok is head and shoulders ahead of Silicon Valley when it comes mixing follows with proximate interests on the FYP; It Just Works!™
I don't what is it with porn on twitter, the blue check was supposed to stop them but they have gotten way worse than before.
I was never a good user for twitter, I don't engage that much except for just reading news and just follow some techie people and communities. But even for my light usage I can clearly see the downgrade of the service
I think this was always an illusion. The blue checkmark certainly hasn't presented a barrier to spammers, and if anything, the reply/promotion boost it gives you has accelerated the rate of spam now that you can more easily get attention.
> I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content.
> adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions
Globally, these positions are not radical (sans Neo-Nazi). The average human is (strongly) opposed to American foreign policy, if not outright pro-Russian/pro-Palestinian.
That said, these topics are also great engagement bait and X does push them for that reason.
They are common but not majority opinion. The average Indian is more supportive of Israel for example. That's the most populous country in the world and you definitely see them on X as well. The average Chinese doesn't care about either and doesn't use any foreign social media apps.
Many of us have a very selective view of the world. When you have a platform that allows most speech from anyone on the planet, such an open platform may seem extremely biased to people used to their bubbles, where their own opinion is the "normal" one and few people disagree with them.
The Chinese are overwhelmingly opposed to US foreign policy. Outright pro-Israel and pro-NATO views are virtually non-existent on Chinese social media.
Some Hindu-supremacist Indians support Israel because of shared Islamophobia, more or less. There is not much rabid Islamophobia outside of the West + India.
>They are common but not majority opinion.
To suggest that the (powerless) majority of 8 billion humans are not opposed to US foreign policy is... wildly out of touch. I would even wager that the average American is generally opposed to current US foreign policy.
I can't speak for US foreign policy, that might be true. I was commenting on your take regarding Israel and Russia, as someone who grew up in Asia - where the majority of the world population lives. A lot of people generally make the mistake of conflating government leadership opinion with the opinion of citizens. Those do not necessarily have anything in common, especially in dictatorships with unelected leaders. The average Chinese does not hate Jews nor do they care much about Russia. The majority have no opinion on this, they could not even find Israel on a map or tell you what the capital of Saudi Arabia is. The state media's reporting reflects the Communist Party's position, not necessarily the position of the people. Although Xi is working hard on drilling the people to make those one and the same.
When I tried to join, there was nothing on the threads.net website except the word "Threads" in front of some spiral particles and a QR code to get the app[0].
More recently it seems they've added a login dialog to the site, but attempting to log in still just immediately prompts you to download the app[1].
Presumably once you've used the app to create and set up an account you can now use it to browse online, but that's not really "fully functional on web" and, relevant for the accusation of data-harvesting, still requires you to download the app.
> Then it has not launched in your region, probably. For me in EU it shows option to login with instagram or browse without a profile.
Threads itself is launched in my region. Could you screenshot the front threads.net page you see (when logged out)?
> No app needed
Do you mean you're able to create an account without the app, or do you just mean that there's no app needed for browsing in your region (with no account, or after the account is set up through the app)?
Option to browse without a profile does seem to be specific to the EU[0], and apparently has some limited functionality (can't search for individual posts).
The second screenshot is a form I can get to, but immediately after logging in it'll prompt to download the app to set up your profile.
There's a web version, and if they do follow through on their Activity Pub integration (which they have already demonstrated in a very limited capacity) then you'll be able to use whatever client you want to follow Threads users.
It's ActivityPub based, Twitter like, social media from Meta
It's been pretty chill over there, lacks the crazy that is Twitter
For me, it opens the potential for a federated social media protocol. Having a big player like Meta means everyone will likely benefit. Federated means we can move between servers without losing the network, allowing for competition in moderation, algorithms, and monetization
I'm not sure this tracks. "having a big player like Walmart in town means everyone will likely benefit" sounds plausible, but in practice they suck all the oxygen out of the room, play dirty, and make it difficult for small operators to "compete" once they gain the advantage. The fediverse is honestly not prepared for this scenario, but I do hope that the communities will rally and give Meta a run for their money. I don't have any ill will against them, but its boring to see the same few entities doing everything. Despite its flaws, portions of the fediverse are vibrant and I really want to see them trive.
Instagram has been recommending me nothing but controversial political posts from Threads. I've rarely been so repelled from signing up for a service that I might have otherwise tried using.
The amount of (very impressive) human labor that went into building something that was dead on delivery. Kudos to them for being able to incentivize engineers to pull through this.
I have a large circle of friends. Many use Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube Premium, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal... Not ONE usage of Threads.
That’s cool and all, but I never commented on if it was impressive or not.
Just was pointing out user numbers and that the average Hacker News commenter’s bubble is not representative of how most of the world uses social media.
The reason threads is considered a success at Meta is because it'd be a marketing failure otherwise. In days past, my team there owned a product that hit over 100M MAU, and it wasn't attention-worthy in any way. It eventually got shutdown and the team disbanded.
> In days past, my team there owned a product that hit over 100M MAU, and it wasn't attention-worthy in any way
This statement is meaningless without knowing what the product, revenue and its Total Addressable Market are. 100M MAU out of 1.5B TAM is not attention-worthy. Twitter at it's peak had 550M MAU, so Threads doing close to 20% of that in less than a year is impressive.
I don’t about instagram, but it was all over the internet. It was Bloomberg and the economist as a twitter killer and was definitely on the front page here as well. It was advertised as only needing an instagram account and as an extension of that
They got 100M users to sign-up which ins't surprising because they advertised the crap out of it in Instagram, which has ~2B users.
I would still consider Threads dead because you don't hear about it. You often see screenshots of tweets or links to tweets on here and other sites, this tells me that people are actively using Twitter/X and engaging with it. But as for threads? I haven't seen a single screenshot or link to Threads outside of ads you get on Instagram about it.
What I see is that Threads is on life support and the life support machine is Instagram, if not got IG, Threads would be 100% DOA.
The article states the exact opposite: "A small, nimble team of engineers built Threads over the course of only five months of technical work" while it "garner[ed] over 100 million sign ups in its first five days". According to the article linked there, there were (up to) 60 engineers in the team. That's 300 person-months, or 25 person-years.
The stock market isn't representative of how real world actors are doing at any given moment. I'd recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But I'm glad you made money
I don't want to seem overly critical, but why is this comment relevant to an engineering focused article on how Threads was built?
This article isn't FUD and your comment adds nothing to the discussion except setting up a strange strawman to attack for some reason I can't quite fathom.
I don't want to see HN become more like Reddit where comments like this tend to dominate, they don't add to the community and only promote negativity and ill-will between community members.
This comment follows multiple others in this thread calling Threads a "dead app" and a waste of money and development resources. Which seem equally irrelevant to the topic and incite this kind of discussion.
Let me try to ask you in the most neutral way possible: how do you feel about being an investor in a company with such a troubled history of privacy violations and one of the key enablers of Surveillance Capitalism?
Investing and not investing in the company mean exactly the same thing. Unless FB issues more shares you aren't buying shares from the company. You're buying from someone else.
Everyone buying shares do it for one of the following reasons:
- They expect to receive a dividend
- They expect to sell it at a higher price later to "someone else".
In the first case, if you believe that the company is unethical, it's immoral to buy a share because you'd be profiting from their wrongdoings. By doing so, you are an accomplice.
In the second, by buying the share you are not signaling you condone the company's actions, but you also have an incentive to get other people in the system.
You can find moral arguments against investing in practically any company. At the end of the day your stance makes no actual difference. The only thing you are doing is missing out. If you are so moral, spend effort into something more meaningful instead of making yourself poorer.
Nobody should be in the stock market evaluating if companies behave ethically. Most companies do not.
I do not invest in Meta specifically, but I would likely not vouch for any companies in my investment portfolio. It's up to the government and the courts to go after them, not me with a paltry few thousand dollars worth of shares.
> It's up to the government and the courts to go after them
Except that the government benefits from their financial success (through taxation and political donations) and the courts are more likely than not following laws that were written to favor them and their interests (through lobbying and regulatory capture), so how do you see this actually happening?
I live in a democracy. The government didn't pop into existence by manifestation of an unseen will, the society in which I live elected them.
If people voted for a government that is butt buddies with the large corporations that exploit society through lobbying and regulatory capture, then the values of that society are already represented, and everyone compromised into unethical corporations having their way.
What is not feasible is me, as an individual investor, voluntarily handicapping my ability to profit off something completely legal, out of some misguided notion that by divesting a few thousand dollars of some unethical company shares I would be saving a society that is far beyond salvation.
I am not the main character in the world at large, I am not a savior. I am just getting by life trying to do what I can that my wife and child are happy. That's really all there is.
> voluntarily handicapping my ability to profit off something completely legal
You are saying this is as if there were no other alternatives for you to employ your excess capital. This is certainly not true.
> some misguided notion (...) I would be saving a society that is far beyond salvation. I am not the main character in the world at large, I am not a savior.
I'm starting to hear this recently, usually thrown at me with the accusation of having Savior Complex with it, and I truly don't understand it. To me, the point is less about saving "society" and more about being able to sleep at night with a clear conscience, knowing that for all the shit that is going around in the world, my work is not doing things worse.
> I am just getting by life trying to do what I can that my wife and child are happy.
Honest question: have you ever talked with your wife about what how much material wealth do you need to be happy?
> You are saying this is as if there were no other alternatives for you to employ your excess capital.
None that I would vouch for as being morally superior. Capitalism is at odds with ethics. Which is why I favor the idea of government as a strong regulator.
> more about being able to sleep at night with a clear conscience
I sleep at night with a clear conscience. The quiet sleep of those that follow the laws agreed upon by society.
> have you ever talked with your wife about what how much material wealth do you need to be happy?
Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out.
2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appeal" button leads to a request to send a confirmation code to my phone, but no code ever arrives (Spanish phone, not a complicated country). There's no button or link to tell them that it doesn't.
I know of others who have experienced the same thing. Move fast and break things indeed.
Also, I constantly receive password reset codes to my email. I am not sure what scammers want to achieve, but it is annoying that Meta cannot do anything.
In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet.
They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I think that's the whole point of these fake bans, to extract personal data from you.
Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes.
To hell with the corporate-owned social networks. I want no part of them anymore. I'm sticking with Mastodon, which is free from this garbage.
My guess is that you signed up through a VPN, and this is an anti-bot automated system. I'm not a meta employee, just speculating. Remember, VPNs are the collective abuse of all of their users, not just you; same with public access networks.
I have noticed that after I get banned from Reddit for idiotic reasons, the accounts I create through VPN get silently blocked on a lot of subreddits, while the account that got created from home ISP had that problem less so.
It's not victim blaming, just a fact that some sites punish VPN users.
> Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims?
Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.
In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a blatant lie.
I'm just explaining the truth. I'm not saying it should be considered OK - we should absolutely look down on the behavior and look for solutions to discourage it.
Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate, but I think my speculation agrees pretty well with their business model and why they might choose to ban people whose analytics data (or lack thereof) matches yours. In fact, it's indeed not a ban, since you can appeal it by providing extra personal data - the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter.
> charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation
I'm not defending their claim - we all know "ToS violation" has been bullshit since the dawn of startups. It's the generic "unhandled exception"/500 error equivalent of the software world.
> Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate
It's funny how you can say these two contradictory things right next to each other.
> the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter.
I already said this in my original comment: "Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes." So there's no need to speculate about my "software stack and/or behavior" that somehow makes me "naughty". The only naughty one is Meta itself, attempting to extract my personal information.
> It's funny how you can say these two contradictory things right next to each other.
Fair enough, we'll agree to disagree on that one. I will happily eat crow if it turns out not to be the truth should there be an eventual source code/internal email leak. Keep in mind that a lot of leaks have already confirmed tech company malicious behaviors that was endlessly speculated on in the past and that it felt too blatant to be true and yet ended up true.
> my "software stack and/or behavior" that somehow makes me "naughty"
Not everyone gets these bans though. If your software stack or behavior allowed them to correlate you with the existing shadow profile they have on you they'll most likely let you pass and not need to bullshit-ban you since they already got your data.
> The only naughty one is Meta itself
Oh yeah absolutely - I always meant naughty in the eyes of Facebook, which is true. In fact you are the opposite of naughty - getting one of these bullshit bans actually suggests your online behavior is on point since Facebook couldn't just infer your personal data from tracking and instead has to force you to provide it.
To be clear I'm not talking about you but about the concept of it "you are not the target market", as if it's something we should consider socially acceptable. I've seen this used as a serious response to legitimize some nefarious/user-hostile behavior which is what I'm "derogatory" about. We should look down on business models that depend on users being clueless and accepting of corporate abuse/malicious behavior and I've provided examples of solutions that could achieve that.
> How else was I supposed to "engage"?
Presumably you're running an ad-blocker or privacy-friendly stack. Or merely willing to use the product by signing up and setting up your account first rather than being nagged into signing up after trying to access loginwalled content. Or maybe you are privacy-conscious and the email/number you provided isn't in any contact databases that Facebook has stolen over the years from unsuspecting users (aka you used a separate email/number from the one you give out to real people).
> How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet.
See above - there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. Just behaving like a power-user and not taking 10 minutes peck-typing your details in the various forms can be enough if at scale such behavior was correlated with what Facebook deems "naughty".
Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.
> I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional
It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information.
On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either.
> The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans
The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical
Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal?
> I would feel bad for that engineer
That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing.
However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable.
Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.
> It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information
How big is this conspiracy? Hundreds to thousands of engineers leave Meta every year, and 0 have blown the whistle on this. The actual FB whistleblower from 2023 didn't allege anything similar to what you're suggesting.
It's a bot prevention measure (allegedly). It also conveniently blocks out people that are more likely to not want to share all of their personal information with them. No skin off my back, the less toxic social media garbage I'm allowed to use, the better for my sanity, good riddance.
Meta/Google/etc... at the end of the day are businesses, and the currency they deal with when transacting with us is our personal information and they convert that to dollars with their partners.
As I also value freedom of association, I am perfectly alright with them refusing to "do business" with me because I do not find the denomination and terms of the transaction acceptable.
I do not really have any inclination to want to compel them to serve me by force of gun, either.
I think both they and myself are better off in this scenario where we just choose to not do business with each other and I find some other business that has more acceptable terms - or I just go without, these services aren't as essential as some people think.
But I did give them my phone number. I'm pretty sure they already had it from Facebook anyway, I've had a FB account for 15 years.
They just were unable to send the code to it, so I could not proceed with whatever appeal process they have in place. That said, if the next step was asking for my face, I'd have probably stopped right there like a poster said. They do have photos of me (Facebook) but it would just be too much.
Another weird experience I had with this company is when I deactivated my FB account. A few months later a friend texted me and asked if I was going to an event. Apparently he had invited me to it on FB and FB didn't tell him my account is deactivated... So I never saw the invite and the system didn't tell him I didn't see it. I tested this with my wife, you still show up in invitable people and probably invite suggestions even when your account is deactivated. That makes no sense to me.
I'm kinda loving the obvious "X" shills in the comments coming just to declare Threads dead. It is literally the 2nd most downloaded app in the AppStore (was #1 for a bit, but Temu is seemingly unstoppable).
Personally, it has become my preferred social media platform. It's overflowing with content and I check in on it several times a day, and have been really enjoying the community that is emerging.
It DOES however have a big porn bot problem, but I don't think that is unique to Threads. Hopefully, they can come up with a way to minimize it soon.
I kinda stopped using Threads and then they started putting controversial posts on it all over my Facebook feed. Pretty clever. Now I check it often again
>It is literally the 2nd most downloaded app in the AppStore
when you push it relentlessly in the facebook app its kind of hard for it not to become #2 overnight.
I give threads eight months before its either riddled with the same trash boomer content as Facebook, or devolves into X in a desperate attempt to emulate its former success. This is less of an innovation for Facebook and more of a convenient pivot now that theyve run out of gas entirely as a social media platform.
I had some experience with this after setting up social media accounts for a conference that I took over in March.
LinkedIn is beating them all, significantly. Instagram is next, which surprised me all little. After that it was X and then finally YouTube, which didn't have any content until September so it will likely/hopefully overtake some soon.
Threads AND Facebook have been kinda terrible. We just shuttered the Threads account and probably getting ready to do the same for the Facebook account. Threads just picked up some followers from Instagram after the initial launch.
Mastodon has a low follower count, but solid engagement among the followers who are there at least. Keeping that one around longer.
We may try Bluesky at some point and I'll continue remaining open to trying new things as they come out, but nothing made me optimistic about Threads from our trial so far.
Seems like your metric is "follows for the sake of follows", which is a vanity metric that's easily gamed. What conversion actions are you measuring, and how are they doing?
As somebody who’s learning social media, followers and my own perceptions are pretty much all I’m measuring. If there’s a way to game follower count, it’s happening without me doing anything to game it.
Engagement is best on our email list, which is nearly parallel with LinkedIn and we’ve got a 40% open rate there.
These numbers are essentially from setting up our Substack and broadcasting the posts out to various different platforms.
As somebody with no idea what they are doing and limited time, what should I be measuring?
My threads feed started OK at launch but now is a wasteland of pointless rage bait and r/antiwork style content. I'm sure it's popular but it's not what I want to read.
On X I get mostly informative ML and robotics content. Of course it took some curation and liberal use of the "Mute Words" feature to get there. But I just don't think that content is there on Threads.
My go-to example of why I don't like what's happening on Threads is Jeff Bezos's last post: https://www.threads.net/@jeffbezos/post/CyFInFjrRxs/?igshid=... The replies are an absolute cesspool. Everything people used to accuse Twitter of being and more.
My only interaction with threads is through suggested posts from Instagram. I think I made the mistake of clicking on one to see what stupid thing someone was claiming. That is all it shows me now. Frustrating for multiple reasons.
> My threads feed started OK at launch but now is a wasteland of pointless rage bait and r/antiwork style content. I'm sure it's popular but it's not what I want to read.
FWIW, you don't have to use Threads' "For You" feed (the equivalent of X's algorithmic feed) at all. But if you like the kismet of seeing other posts, blocking liberally will sort that out.
Too much anti-X (anti-Musk) trolling on Threads. Threads users really need to focus on building something good themselves, rather than simply attacking the incumbent.
It feels like the whole purpose of Threads is just one-upmanship against Elon Musk, and as such, it's just a hollow shell of a community.
Pointless rage-bait Threads content regularly comes up on Instagram and I find it a turn-off for the new social network.
This is not true for Mastodon though because it's not mainstream. Niche servers with people passionate about certain subjects; active niche communities with great content. Kind of like hacker news.
This is also why I was scared of Threads using ActivityPub, I don't want my precious small mastodon instances getting flooded with mainstream content.
The recommendation algorithm is pretty awful and needs a lot of intervention to start surfacing great content. Life got a lot better once I started clicking "hide" on particularly egregious posts and avoiding interaction. It seems to disproportionately weight "click to view" interactions so avoiding morbid curiosity when seeing a bad take helps.
If there weren't pressure to use it for my small side business I'd have given up on it almost immediately.
I wanted Threads to work but have given up on it, visiting occasionally for a couple of AI-related accounts and that's it. All the constant hype about its download counts hasn't remotely correlated with actual worthwhile content. There is little NFL or F1 content there (lots of players created accounts and then abandoned it), tech content is largely masturbatory "look we're Tech Threads" type content, etc.
And to be clear, I deleted my Twitter account shortly after Musk's purchase. I'm not an X "shill", though to offer the counterpoint when I see someone "shilling" Threads I assume they have some iota of success there and really, really want it to be a thing so they'll constantly tell you all about how it ranks in downloads.
Thread's algorithms are absolutely fetid garbage. Despite following a couple hundred good accounts and trying to like content I enjoyed, my for you was endlessly filled with almost an inverse set of what I want to see. I didn't engage these posts but instead would just mute/block copiously. It would redouble the same. "Tech" Threads recently has been 100% occupied with Meta employees bitching and whining about Apple, which grows super old. I could switch to Following, but so few people actually post there that it's just sadness, and the few who do post frequently are so obviously desperate to try to make a social media "presence" that it's just...the opposite of not cringey. And again it is shocking how much content on Threads is about Threads, or about Twitter. It's just incredibly boring.
And this is the honeymoon period! If this is the best it can offer, what happens when Meta starts actually turning the screws?
It used to be my favorite social media platform, but I quickly deactivated my account on Christmas and then deleted the app.
The major problem is that Threads will surface and even recommend (via your Facebook feed as well) threads that people you follow have responded to. Great in theory, but on Christmas Day I opened up FB to find it recommended this highly toxic anti-gay post in the middle of all my friends' posts about the holiday. It was because someone I follow on threads took the bait and commented on this post.
I've had far too many instances of this sort of behavior in my life and the only options available were to unfollow everyone, constantly block these abusive actors, or leave. For me, it was absolutely not worth staying, despite the up sides.
Gotta love how far MySQL + k/v store can get ya. I have no experience with zippyDB, but MySQL and ScyllaDB certainly feels like having an M1 Abrams and a B2 Spirit in my back pocket. I’m constantly pushing the “relationships from MySQL, data from Cassandra” narrative. It sounds like Facebook has a similar approach - although this post doesn’t make it clear where message data actually resides.
MySQL, ScyllaDB, and RabbitMQ. A stack made in pragmatist heaven by devops angels. Now to find some developers who don’t hate it ;)
For me it's mostly about known-knowns. I've been responsible for pretty large/company-critical MySQL clusters and have managed to sleep soundly at night. I tend to be the "database guy" at every startup, and those startups tended to use MySQL.
I have to say, I do love PostGIS. But for "this data absolutely cannot be lost or its game-over", I'd go MySQL every time. I can and have debugged MySQL replication on zero hours of sleep. It's entirely possible Postgres 16 is the better choice for new projects today, but I haven't had the time to try it out in production yet.
It amazes me how much better MySQL has been in this regard for at least a decade, and it's also amazing that it's still not that well-known today. Back in 2015 I worked at a fast-growing unicorn that had badly implemented basically everything because they started with a tiny ops team of grads and developers. Very little was being monitored, there were only a handful of metrics being graphed (mostly network stuff in Cacti). Our DB issues were all caused by stupid stuff :
* undetected hard disk in array fails
* battery in array controller fails
* disk fills up
* dubious backups, with no point-in-time recovery
* extremely poorly written SQL queries
* poory configured MySQL (in oh-so-many ways)
The top three (at least) would lastly cause replication lag, which would eventually trigger an alert. ... And yet we never lost a cluster. (And we far a lot of them!)
My team sweated blood improving processes and tooling, and then I spent a 6 month stint on database clusters (switching to GTID based replication and rewriting the ops config code so that they were all consistently configured and monitored).
Occasionally we'd get a new senior hire insist that PostgreSQL was a necessity, so we'd stand back and let them produce a proof of concept that stood up to the types of failures our MySQL clusters dealt with regularly, without waking oncall up at night. And it was always a bit of a joke by comparison.
I haven't worked in big tech but I imagine their tooling is really good for this particular stack. Internal expertise too for running into big scale edge cases.
From having talked to Facebook engineers (I suspect Instagram/Threads is a very different beast for historical reasons), Facebook is only built on "PHP and MySQL" in the sense that the statement is technically correct but not helpful.
The way Facebook apparently uses MySQL is not "MySQL + k/v store" but "MySQL is the k/v store". Forget SQL, they treat it as a key-value lookup and it's good enough for that. This also explains a lot of oddities coming out of FB engineering open source that at times look like they're trying to roll their own database on top of ... well, a database.
I wouldn't go to Facebook for architecture advice unless you have both the scale of Facebook and the technological baggage of Facebook. I'm not sure how transferrable this writeup about Threads is either given that Threads is so strongly tied to Instagram (although EU legislation seems to have motivated Meta at least to no longer require users to delete their Instagram account in order to delete their Threads profile).
> look like they're trying to roll their own database on top of ... well, a database.
That’s exactly what fb is doing. MySQL isn’t used as a k/v store per se but as the storage layer of the Tao graph database (which is also using memcache. So fb builds a database on top of 2 databases, technically). Source: https://engineering.fb.com/2013/06/25/core-infra/tao-the-pow...
This is not correct. Facebook has a large number of distinct MySQL tiers, which serve different purposes and have wildly different workloads. None of them are traditional "key-value lookup" workloads, not even the core user database (entities/associations); this k/v claim is often repeated here, but has never been an accurate representation of the architecture. The TAO graph access pattern absolutely requires range scans over indexes, which is not compatible with a k/v access pattern.
source: I'm a former member of one of Facebook's MySQL teams, and among other things I worked heavily on the managed database-as-a-service tier. This was like an internal-only RDS, used by thousands of engineers for many different purposes, most of which involved SQL.
>given that I still post a lot about MySQL on HN in the year 2024 :)
Not nearly enough So please do that more often :)
Seriously I dont want HN to be one sided about RMDBS and I constantly submit a lot of MySQL related content and release notes. And there is still a whole world using MySQL for a lot of different reasons.
Especially now Oracle has finally updated MySQL release schedule.
I can only go by what FB people have told me in person and that was "we use MySQL pretty much just as a k/v store". I think all the people I talked to worked on the frontend rather than MySQL directly though, so if you worked with MySQL directly that seems more authoritative.
Facebook actually moved off of Cassandra well over a decade ago. Not sure about other Meta properties though like Instagram, but the original article here doesn't mention it anywhere.
I've never seen a company where performance evaluation gets as much focus as it does at Meta. Some people's entire existence at the company is to game PSCs.
I think you are looking too hard for a secret purpose. I think they just want to keep making bets on controlling the social network space. They see Twitter failing and it seems like a great time to try and snag the market. They use ActivityPub as a selling point and Instagram users as an existing network and hope to replace Twitter. Instagram still seems pretty popular but they are clearly missing some part of the market with a text-based network so they are both expanding and diversifying. Facebook is already circling the drain (although it will probably be circling that drain for a decade) and they don't know if Instagram will continue to be popular.
I'm sure harvesting data for LLMs is a great side benefit, but if that was their main goal they would probably just run a crawler. They could even crawl ActivityPub without having their own instance if they wanted. It is a public API. They would just miss out on private posts which is probably a small fraction.
What do folks use for something like Meta’s Async? RabbitMQ?
> The workloads commonly executed on Async are those that do not require blocking an active user’s experience with a product and can be performed anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after a user’s action.
Pretty much any queue and a compute will do. SQS paired with lambda an event bridge (I forget if that's the service to trigger the lambda or not) would be solid. I lean towards compute that's a bit easier to run in different settings so just any old code checking the queue and executing as expected also works. SQS is cheap and it's pretty damn solid. I believe it was the first AWS service.
But in reality, any managed queue or even a well structured DB table can be fine, depending on your scale.
Is using Lambda with an external data store (like MongoDB) a solved problem?
I remember this being an issue a long time ago, where Lambda pretty much was a non starter for use cases where you're running 1000 independent tasks that each, on their own, is a small unit of work (just 1 or 2 database queries).
Long way of asking: is there a way to share a database connection between lambda functions or does each run need to re-establish / re-authenticate a new connection with the database?
I'm an enormous fan of Google Cloud Tasks (previously known as the Google App Engine task service). The low-level mechanism is "call this URL later" but with a tiny bit of application glue the abstraction is "run this code later".
Generally I'd suggest combining different messaging/streaming(ex: Kafka) & FaaS/serverless (ex: OpenFaaS, Fission, OpenWhisk) layers to achieve something like Async. Where-as Async seems to be a bit of both. I think over time we'll see streaming systems expand their footprint & keep eating away at the space pure FaaS occupies.
Apache Pulsar has been around for a while as a streaming system, and it does have a fairly significant Pulsar Functions layer which might make it a decent all in one candidate. (Pulsar in general feels like a much smarter lower-latency take on Kafka, allowing much more control/flexibility of where data gets backed/replicated/read from that makes it exceedingly more useful for "log/stream is the database" styles.)
https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/3.1.x/functions-overview/
There's so many up and coming streaming things here. Apache Ballista. Netflix's Mantis. RisingWave. A million years ago there was SOA; a startup I was at used Apache Camel. Benthos. Others. Many of these will decidedly remain more streaming oriented, not encroach on FaaS space, which is fine, but I think we'll see overlap grow. Reductionist, but a function call is "run this code when a function name and parameters happen" versus maybe "run this code when an event type happens", which seems not so far apart to me.
I will not touch anything Meta/Zuckerberg related with a 10 foot pole, and I would advise anyone to do the same. FB and Instagram are giant drivers of depression and bitterness, they shouldn't be supported financially or otherwise.
The trajectory shows it is going up. Threads is doing good considering they didn't have a web client until late August and wasn't in the EU until mid-December.
Sadly, Cloudflare didn't include this in their notes for additional context - not the best journalism.
It's in the top 5 overall apps across many countries in the EU. The Tech Threads and Photography community are especially good there.
As a user of Threads and X (formerly known as Twitter). Threads is so dog slow, even compared to Instagram. Slow to respond to requests for just about everything (several seconds), even slower at showing an up to date feed (10s of seconds). Really think it's what's holding back adoption because Twitter can show up to date personalized posts in under a second.
I love all the quality of life features Threads is adding, but it severely lags FB/Instagram/Twitter in showing up to date information quickly.
It really irks me when a big company like Meta tries to describe a new project as a startup created by a "nimble team of engineers". In the blog post they link to [1]
>Threads was developed in an environment more akin to a startup.
OK sure, a small group of people broke the model of development and did something new from the ground up?
>Threads scaled successfully to 100 million users without any major downtime thanks to Meta’s underlying infrastructure and engineering foundations, which were critical to the successful launch.
Ah, no. All of the underlying hard parts were done already for them. That's not a startup.
They never claimed their stack was startup-like, just the process. They are likely contrasting it with their usual[0] engineering practices: no focus-grouping, applying for headcount from 3 directors and making a 4-year roadmap after a gaggle of project managers finally agree on what to build. Perhaps its just one decision-maker and bunch if empowered engineers and no red tape - which would be very much be closer to startups, without denying themselves access to humongous datacenters.
0. Exaggerating some of the bureaucracy I've seen in larger orgs
183 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadTwitter never caught in a lot of places while threads might have a chance.
They used a small team to build an app in 5 months that handled going from 0 to 100 mil users in 5 days.
Doesn’t sound neither lots of money and engineering, or false idea if it had 100 mil signups in 5 days.
At 1.2 billion monthly users that's a pretty average CTR for that kind of thing. A little extra because threads still isn't available worldwide so some traffic was just lost.
They didn't have to, though - the news outlets were running stories on Threads and its impending arrival nearly every day. To claim, as GP does, it was entirely "organic" is nonsense.
Threads reached 100M users in July [2].
[1] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/threads-banks-on...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/10/with-10...
That's your problem, right here. The social graph is the strongest signal there is.
Try following the people that are more interesting to you and your recommendations will vastly improve. Or don't, and just come to the Fediverse and use a nitter frontend for the occasional twitter link.
But Twitter allows you to curate your graph with the Following tab way better. There are enough sub-communities and funny people for it to still work.
And all recommendation algorithms are vulnerable. Thread’s head honcho had to release a statement because the recommendation algorithm on Threads became awful over the holiday period. And they aggressively want you on the FYP!
I was never a good user for twitter, I don't engage that much except for just reading news and just follow some techie people and communities. But even for my light usage I can clearly see the downgrade of the service
I think this was always an illusion. The blue checkmark certainly hasn't presented a barrier to spammers, and if anything, the reply/promotion boost it gives you has accelerated the rate of spam now that you can more easily get attention.
> adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions
Globally, these positions are not radical (sans Neo-Nazi). The average human is (strongly) opposed to American foreign policy, if not outright pro-Russian/pro-Palestinian.
That said, these topics are also great engagement bait and X does push them for that reason.
Many of us have a very selective view of the world. When you have a platform that allows most speech from anyone on the planet, such an open platform may seem extremely biased to people used to their bubbles, where their own opinion is the "normal" one and few people disagree with them.
Some Hindu-supremacist Indians support Israel because of shared Islamophobia, more or less. There is not much rabid Islamophobia outside of the West + India.
>They are common but not majority opinion.
To suggest that the (powerless) majority of 8 billion humans are not opposed to US foreign policy is... wildly out of touch. I would even wager that the average American is generally opposed to current US foreign policy.
More recently it seems they've added a login dialog to the site, but attempting to log in still just immediately prompts you to download the app[1].
Presumably once you've used the app to create and set up an account you can now use it to browse online, but that's not really "fully functional on web" and, relevant for the accusation of data-harvesting, still requires you to download the app.
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/PQF7bkm.png
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/zLfubq1.png
Threads itself is launched in my region. Could you screenshot the front threads.net page you see (when logged out)?
> No app needed
Do you mean you're able to create an account without the app, or do you just mean that there's no app needed for browsing in your region (with no account, or after the account is set up through the app)?
https://imgur.com/ZhzfDap
The second screenshot is a form I can get to, but immediately after logging in it'll prompt to download the app to set up your profile.
[0]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/threads-mak...
I'm willing to gamble insane amounts on that's never ever going to happen.
It's been pretty chill over there, lacks the crazy that is Twitter
For me, it opens the potential for a federated social media protocol. Having a big player like Meta means everyone will likely benefit. Federated means we can move between servers without losing the network, allowing for competition in moderation, algorithms, and monetization
Threads has only been available for 6 months, they plan for full integration
If Zuck knows one thing, it's social media trends, it's what he's thought about his whole life
Nobody in my circle uses Snapchat, yet it’s worth $27B…
If anything, this might mean your circle is quite small.
That’s like saying it’s impressive I made a million dollar company after my dad gave me 2 billion.
Just was pointing out user numbers and that the average Hacker News commenter’s bubble is not representative of how most of the world uses social media.
And now they have reached 100M MAU which shows that people are coming and staying.
This statement is meaningless without knowing what the product, revenue and its Total Addressable Market are. 100M MAU out of 1.5B TAM is not attention-worthy. Twitter at it's peak had 550M MAU, so Threads doing close to 20% of that in less than a year is impressive.
The current MAU is calculated by counting the users who see threads on instagram and accidentally click on it - which is A LOT.
I would still consider Threads dead because you don't hear about it. You often see screenshots of tweets or links to tweets on here and other sites, this tells me that people are actively using Twitter/X and engaging with it. But as for threads? I haven't seen a single screenshot or link to Threads outside of ads you get on Instagram about it.
What I see is that Threads is on life support and the life support machine is Instagram, if not got IG, Threads would be 100% DOA.
whether he's a bully or not has zero effect on the correctness of his statements
It's going to be interesting if they really enable full ActivityPub integration
This article isn't FUD and your comment adds nothing to the discussion except setting up a strange strawman to attack for some reason I can't quite fathom.
I don't want to see HN become more like Reddit where comments like this tend to dominate, they don't add to the community and only promote negativity and ill-will between community members.
Everyone buying shares do it for one of the following reasons:
- They expect to receive a dividend
- They expect to sell it at a higher price later to "someone else".
In the first case, if you believe that the company is unethical, it's immoral to buy a share because you'd be profiting from their wrongdoings. By doing so, you are an accomplice.
In the second, by buying the share you are not signaling you condone the company's actions, but you also have an incentive to get other people in the system.
Then maybe we shouldn't invest in most companies?
> The only thing you are doing is missing out.
"First, do no harm".
If someone tells you they are going to rob someone else's home with a 0% chance of getting caught, do you join them?
Speak for yourself. I and I would say most don't care about your moral grand standing.
> If someone tells you they are going to rob someone else's home with a 0% chance of getting caught, do you join them?
Neither do I care about arguing against a straw man.
I do not invest in Meta specifically, but I would likely not vouch for any companies in my investment portfolio. It's up to the government and the courts to go after them, not me with a paltry few thousand dollars worth of shares.
Except that the government benefits from their financial success (through taxation and political donations) and the courts are more likely than not following laws that were written to favor them and their interests (through lobbying and regulatory capture), so how do you see this actually happening?
If people voted for a government that is butt buddies with the large corporations that exploit society through lobbying and regulatory capture, then the values of that society are already represented, and everyone compromised into unethical corporations having their way.
What is not feasible is me, as an individual investor, voluntarily handicapping my ability to profit off something completely legal, out of some misguided notion that by divesting a few thousand dollars of some unethical company shares I would be saving a society that is far beyond salvation.
I am not the main character in the world at large, I am not a savior. I am just getting by life trying to do what I can that my wife and child are happy. That's really all there is.
You are saying this is as if there were no other alternatives for you to employ your excess capital. This is certainly not true.
> some misguided notion (...) I would be saving a society that is far beyond salvation. I am not the main character in the world at large, I am not a savior.
I'm starting to hear this recently, usually thrown at me with the accusation of having Savior Complex with it, and I truly don't understand it. To me, the point is less about saving "society" and more about being able to sleep at night with a clear conscience, knowing that for all the shit that is going around in the world, my work is not doing things worse.
> I am just getting by life trying to do what I can that my wife and child are happy.
Honest question: have you ever talked with your wife about what how much material wealth do you need to be happy?
None that I would vouch for as being morally superior. Capitalism is at odds with ethics. Which is why I favor the idea of government as a strong regulator.
> more about being able to sleep at night with a clear conscience
I sleep at night with a clear conscience. The quiet sleep of those that follow the laws agreed upon by society.
> have you ever talked with your wife about what how much material wealth do you need to be happy?
She is a woman. Her answer is "more".
Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out.
2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appeal" button leads to a request to send a confirmation code to my phone, but no code ever arrives (Spanish phone, not a complicated country). There's no button or link to tell them that it doesn't.
I know of others who have experienced the same thing. Move fast and break things indeed.
They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I think that's the whole point of these fake bans, to extract personal data from you.
Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes.
To hell with the corporate-owned social networks. I want no part of them anymore. I'm sticking with Mastodon, which is free from this garbage.
You're not supposed to do that here.
> The reason you're insta-banned is that you didn't "engage" with it properly
I was literally in the process of signing up. How else was I supposed to "engage"?
> Facebook does not want technically-savvy people
How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet.
Your guess is wrong. I don't use any VPN.
Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims?
It's not victim blaming, just a fact that some sites punish VPN users.
Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.
> there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992
In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a blatant lie.
Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate, but I think my speculation agrees pretty well with their business model and why they might choose to ban people whose analytics data (or lack thereof) matches yours. In fact, it's indeed not a ban, since you can appeal it by providing extra personal data - the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter.
> charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation
I'm not defending their claim - we all know "ToS violation" has been bullshit since the dawn of startups. It's the generic "unhandled exception"/500 error equivalent of the software world.
> Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate
It's funny how you can say these two contradictory things right next to each other.
> the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter.
I already said this in my original comment: "Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes." So there's no need to speculate about my "software stack and/or behavior" that somehow makes me "naughty". The only naughty one is Meta itself, attempting to extract my personal information.
Fair enough, we'll agree to disagree on that one. I will happily eat crow if it turns out not to be the truth should there be an eventual source code/internal email leak. Keep in mind that a lot of leaks have already confirmed tech company malicious behaviors that was endlessly speculated on in the past and that it felt too blatant to be true and yet ended up true.
> my "software stack and/or behavior" that somehow makes me "naughty"
Not everyone gets these bans though. If your software stack or behavior allowed them to correlate you with the existing shadow profile they have on you they'll most likely let you pass and not need to bullshit-ban you since they already got your data.
> The only naughty one is Meta itself
Oh yeah absolutely - I always meant naughty in the eyes of Facebook, which is true. In fact you are the opposite of naughty - getting one of these bullshit bans actually suggests your online behavior is on point since Facebook couldn't just infer your personal data from tracking and instead has to force you to provide it.
Victims of what?
To be clear I'm not talking about you but about the concept of it "you are not the target market", as if it's something we should consider socially acceptable. I've seen this used as a serious response to legitimize some nefarious/user-hostile behavior which is what I'm "derogatory" about. We should look down on business models that depend on users being clueless and accepting of corporate abuse/malicious behavior and I've provided examples of solutions that could achieve that.
> How else was I supposed to "engage"?
Presumably you're running an ad-blocker or privacy-friendly stack. Or merely willing to use the product by signing up and setting up your account first rather than being nagged into signing up after trying to access loginwalled content. Or maybe you are privacy-conscious and the email/number you provided isn't in any contact databases that Facebook has stolen over the years from unsuspecting users (aka you used a separate email/number from the one you give out to real people).
> How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet.
See above - there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. Just behaving like a power-user and not taking 10 minutes peck-typing your details in the various forms can be enough if at scale such behavior was correlated with what Facebook deems "naughty".
It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information.
On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either.
> The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans
The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical
Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal?
> I would feel bad for that engineer
That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing.
However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable.
Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.
How big is this conspiracy? Hundreds to thousands of engineers leave Meta every year, and 0 have blown the whistle on this. The actual FB whistleblower from 2023 didn't allege anything similar to what you're suggesting.
As I also value freedom of association, I am perfectly alright with them refusing to "do business" with me because I do not find the denomination and terms of the transaction acceptable.
I do not really have any inclination to want to compel them to serve me by force of gun, either.
I think both they and myself are better off in this scenario where we just choose to not do business with each other and I find some other business that has more acceptable terms - or I just go without, these services aren't as essential as some people think.
They just were unable to send the code to it, so I could not proceed with whatever appeal process they have in place. That said, if the next step was asking for my face, I'd have probably stopped right there like a poster said. They do have photos of me (Facebook) but it would just be too much.
Personally, it has become my preferred social media platform. It's overflowing with content and I check in on it several times a day, and have been really enjoying the community that is emerging.
It DOES however have a big porn bot problem, but I don't think that is unique to Threads. Hopefully, they can come up with a way to minimize it soon.
when you push it relentlessly in the facebook app its kind of hard for it not to become #2 overnight.
I give threads eight months before its either riddled with the same trash boomer content as Facebook, or devolves into X in a desperate attempt to emulate its former success. This is less of an innovation for Facebook and more of a convenient pivot now that theyve run out of gas entirely as a social media platform.
LinkedIn is beating them all, significantly. Instagram is next, which surprised me all little. After that it was X and then finally YouTube, which didn't have any content until September so it will likely/hopefully overtake some soon.
Threads AND Facebook have been kinda terrible. We just shuttered the Threads account and probably getting ready to do the same for the Facebook account. Threads just picked up some followers from Instagram after the initial launch.
Mastodon has a low follower count, but solid engagement among the followers who are there at least. Keeping that one around longer.
We may try Bluesky at some point and I'll continue remaining open to trying new things as they come out, but nothing made me optimistic about Threads from our trial so far.
Here's the report: https://twitter.com/CodesCarolina/status/1744410822720303348
Seems like your metric is "follows for the sake of follows", which is a vanity metric that's easily gamed. What conversion actions are you measuring, and how are they doing?
Engagement is best on our email list, which is nearly parallel with LinkedIn and we’ve got a 40% open rate there.
These numbers are essentially from setting up our Substack and broadcasting the posts out to various different platforms.
As somebody with no idea what they are doing and limited time, what should I be measuring?
On X I get mostly informative ML and robotics content. Of course it took some curation and liberal use of the "Mute Words" feature to get there. But I just don't think that content is there on Threads.
My go-to example of why I don't like what's happening on Threads is Jeff Bezos's last post: https://www.threads.net/@jeffbezos/post/CyFInFjrRxs/?igshid=... The replies are an absolute cesspool. Everything people used to accuse Twitter of being and more.
This was also my experience.
Why do people enjoy this stuff.
FWIW, you don't have to use Threads' "For You" feed (the equivalent of X's algorithmic feed) at all. But if you like the kismet of seeing other posts, blocking liberally will sort that out.
It feels like the whole purpose of Threads is just one-upmanship against Elon Musk, and as such, it's just a hollow shell of a community.
Pointless rage-bait Threads content regularly comes up on Instagram and I find it a turn-off for the new social network.
Only NPCs expect good, uplifting content to be handed to them without work.
This applies to both X and Threads.
If there weren't pressure to use it for my small side business I'd have given up on it almost immediately.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And to be clear, I deleted my Twitter account shortly after Musk's purchase. I'm not an X "shill", though to offer the counterpoint when I see someone "shilling" Threads I assume they have some iota of success there and really, really want it to be a thing so they'll constantly tell you all about how it ranks in downloads.
Thread's algorithms are absolutely fetid garbage. Despite following a couple hundred good accounts and trying to like content I enjoyed, my for you was endlessly filled with almost an inverse set of what I want to see. I didn't engage these posts but instead would just mute/block copiously. It would redouble the same. "Tech" Threads recently has been 100% occupied with Meta employees bitching and whining about Apple, which grows super old. I could switch to Following, but so few people actually post there that it's just sadness, and the few who do post frequently are so obviously desperate to try to make a social media "presence" that it's just...the opposite of not cringey. And again it is shocking how much content on Threads is about Threads, or about Twitter. It's just incredibly boring.
And this is the honeymoon period! If this is the best it can offer, what happens when Meta starts actually turning the screws?
The major problem is that Threads will surface and even recommend (via your Facebook feed as well) threads that people you follow have responded to. Great in theory, but on Christmas Day I opened up FB to find it recommended this highly toxic anti-gay post in the middle of all my friends' posts about the holiday. It was because someone I follow on threads took the bait and commented on this post.
I've had far too many instances of this sort of behavior in my life and the only options available were to unfollow everyone, constantly block these abusive actors, or leave. For me, it was absolutely not worth staying, despite the up sides.
I'd encourage people to give Threads and Bluesky a try. Both don't have a CEO that amplifies conspiracy theories and falsehoods.
MySQL, ScyllaDB, and RabbitMQ. A stack made in pragmatist heaven by devops angels. Now to find some developers who don’t hate it ;)
I have to say, I do love PostGIS. But for "this data absolutely cannot be lost or its game-over", I'd go MySQL every time. I can and have debugged MySQL replication on zero hours of sleep. It's entirely possible Postgres 16 is the better choice for new projects today, but I haven't had the time to try it out in production yet.
Man...times have seriously changed if that's the case. Good for MySQL to improve enough to get that recommendation.
* undetected hard disk in array fails
* battery in array controller fails
* disk fills up
* dubious backups, with no point-in-time recovery
* extremely poorly written SQL queries
* poory configured MySQL (in oh-so-many ways)
The top three (at least) would lastly cause replication lag, which would eventually trigger an alert. ... And yet we never lost a cluster. (And we far a lot of them!)
My team sweated blood improving processes and tooling, and then I spent a 6 month stint on database clusters (switching to GTID based replication and rewriting the ops config code so that they were all consistently configured and monitored).
Occasionally we'd get a new senior hire insist that PostgreSQL was a necessity, so we'd stand back and let them produce a proof of concept that stood up to the types of failures our MySQL clusters dealt with regularly, without waking oncall up at night. And it was always a bit of a joke by comparison.
The way Facebook apparently uses MySQL is not "MySQL + k/v store" but "MySQL is the k/v store". Forget SQL, they treat it as a key-value lookup and it's good enough for that. This also explains a lot of oddities coming out of FB engineering open source that at times look like they're trying to roll their own database on top of ... well, a database.
I wouldn't go to Facebook for architecture advice unless you have both the scale of Facebook and the technological baggage of Facebook. I'm not sure how transferrable this writeup about Threads is either given that Threads is so strongly tied to Instagram (although EU legislation seems to have motivated Meta at least to no longer require users to delete their Instagram account in order to delete their Threads profile).
That’s exactly what fb is doing. MySQL isn’t used as a k/v store per se but as the storage layer of the Tao graph database (which is also using memcache. So fb builds a database on top of 2 databases, technically). Source: https://engineering.fb.com/2013/06/25/core-infra/tao-the-pow...
source: I'm a former member of one of Facebook's MySQL teams, and among other things I worked heavily on the managed database-as-a-service tier. This was like an internal-only RDS, used by thousands of engineers for many different purposes, most of which involved SQL.
I'm a big fan of MySQL's scaling properties and some of the tooling (Vitess).
Do you see any emergent general purpose RDBMS achieving similar popularity of MySQL and/or PostgreSQL in the near future?
I heard good things about Clickhouse but it's a different tool (column based) from my understanding.
In all seriousness though, as a bootstrapped founder I'm not usually able to devote time to tinkering with emergent databases, sorry!
From what I've heard, Clickhouse is excellent, but it is OLAP focused rather than OLTP.
Keep it up!
Not nearly enough So please do that more often :)
Seriously I dont want HN to be one sided about RMDBS and I constantly submit a lot of MySQL related content and release notes. And there is still a whole world using MySQL for a lot of different reasons.
Especially now Oracle has finally updated MySQL release schedule.
Do they still use TAO?
Just wondering if they will ever open source TAO.
I can only dream of being able to cite an article like this on my impacc...
(and also a shameless plug: I featured this article in my last newsletter https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/p/most-read-tech-articles...)
I'm sure harvesting data for LLMs is a great side benefit, but if that was their main goal they would probably just run a crawler. They could even crawl ActivityPub without having their own instance if they wanted. It is a public API. They would just miss out on private posts which is probably a small fraction.
> The workloads commonly executed on Async are those that do not require blocking an active user’s experience with a product and can be performed anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after a user’s action.
But in reality, any managed queue or even a well structured DB table can be fine, depending on your scale.
I remember this being an issue a long time ago, where Lambda pretty much was a non starter for use cases where you're running 1000 independent tasks that each, on their own, is a small unit of work (just 1 or 2 database queries).
Long way of asking: is there a way to share a database connection between lambda functions or does each run need to re-establish / re-authenticate a new connection with the database?
https://www.jeremydaly.com/reuse-database-connections-aws-la...
It will get re-used across lambda invocations as long as the instance of it isn't killed which typically happens after a few minutes
This outlines creating the handler outside the function context to allow the client to be reused between invocations.
Apache Pulsar has been around for a while as a streaming system, and it does have a fairly significant Pulsar Functions layer which might make it a decent all in one candidate. (Pulsar in general feels like a much smarter lower-latency take on Kafka, allowing much more control/flexibility of where data gets backed/replicated/read from that makes it exceedingly more useful for "log/stream is the database" styles.) https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/3.1.x/functions-overview/
There's so many up and coming streaming things here. Apache Ballista. Netflix's Mantis. RisingWave. A million years ago there was SOA; a startup I was at used Apache Camel. Benthos. Others. Many of these will decidedly remain more streaming oriented, not encroach on FaaS space, which is fine, but I think we'll see overlap grow. Reductionist, but a function call is "run this code when a function name and parameters happen" versus maybe "run this code when an event type happens", which seems not so far apart to me.
(source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review-intern...)
It's in the top 5 overall apps across many countries in the EU. The Tech Threads and Photography community are especially good there.
I love all the quality of life features Threads is adding, but it severely lags FB/Instagram/Twitter in showing up to date information quickly.
>Threads was developed in an environment more akin to a startup.
OK sure, a small group of people broke the model of development and did something new from the ground up?
>Threads scaled successfully to 100 million users without any major downtime thanks to Meta’s underlying infrastructure and engineering foundations, which were critical to the successful launch.
Ah, no. All of the underlying hard parts were done already for them. That's not a startup.
[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...
0. Exaggerating some of the bureaucracy I've seen in larger orgs
What a nice way to say we don't respect our engineers. They should hide in the woods with their planning skills and not post about it