But my hope is that whether using Threads or Instagram or Twitter or Tik Tok or YouTube, or whatever it is, that reach is not an end, but it is a means to an end. Because ideally, you are clear with yourself about what you’re trying to get out of the platform. Are you trying to sell tickets to your gigs because you’re a musician? Are you trying to advance a cause because you’re an activist? Are you trying to just raise awareness around your art if you’re an artist?
That said, we do care about reach, we do try to grow reach. My advice is — and I think what a lot of people don’t realize, because a lot of people are coming over from Instagram — they don’t realize how important the reply game is. If you’re really trying to grow your presence, you should reply much more than you post. And the sum of all your replies is about as valuable as the sum of all the value of all your posts.
When people treat it, like, I’m just going to post and then move on with my day and then post again in a couple days and move on with my day — that’s not what it’s designed for. If it was for that, we wouldn’t have built it as a separate app — we would have built it in Instagram. But we built it so that the reply was as important as the original post — so that you could facilitate, when you’re lucky, these great conversations, which by the way helps with discovery.
Casey Newton
So… the secret recipe for reach on Threads is to become a ‘reply guy’?!
Sarcasm aside, I felt this interview was pretty reflective of the contradictions that plague Threads. While Adam Mosseri may say the right things in interviews and his Instagram vids, the actual choices Meta takes often contradict him. Taking an example in the quote above, say you’re an activist that has selected Threads to promote a cause – would you be able to do that effectively if you cross Instagram’s blurry lines on so-called ‘political content’?
When Mosseri talks about the news he welcomes on Threads, his examples are the NBA finals, the Met Gala, the Grammys – the most vacuous, inconsequential popular content that can be found in any tabloid or AI-written piece online. The interoperability with the Fediverse has slipped into a long-term bet
that is proving very difficult
– something that was clear to me from the start. Also, immensely ironic how Mosseri touts replying for increased reach in one sentence and presents plans to introduce reply controls and moderation later on:
So let’s talk about year two. What are your priorities for Threads?
We have to do a lot of things. We have to really improve the ranking of posts in the feed. We need to get better at understanding your interests, and we need to do better at adapting as your interests change. So how quickly can we learn your interests?
If you just look at core measures of ranking quality, things like, if you normalize for position, how many likes does an average recommendation get on [an account that you follow versus one that you don’t]? When you look at Instagram versus Threads, we’re just way behind. So we definitely have to make a lot of improvements there.
Another key focus is how do we double down on one of our differentiators, which is just to be a less angry space. We’ve done some interesting things. Just doing some of the basic content moderation helps. But things like controlling who can reply, controlling who can quote, hidden words — these features, I think, are important beyond their usage. They’re about setting a tone, and they’re about establishing an identity for the network.
It’s obvious that Meta’s decisions are driven by the ultimate goal of creating a brand-safe space for advertisers and thus snatching up whatever minuscule portion of the ad market that Twitter still holds on to. But their quest to tightly control what gets promoted by the algorithm and to limit ‘angriness’ has already produced a product that feels bland and anodyne, to me at least. These past days, Twitter has been a maelstrom of commentary about Biden’s abysmal debate performance, a blend of dire and funny in thoroughly Twitter fashion, while Threads was essentially silent on the topic. I for one know that I prefer to stay in touch with impactful events in the world, not what some fleeting star wore on the night of the Met Gala.
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