July 2023 witnessed the advent of Meta's answer to Twitter, launched at the precise moment when the platform was rapidly shedding users, credibility, and advertisers. The audience seemed ready, and the early numbers were extraordinary. Soon enough, the initial frenzy subsided, the daily active user numbers dipped, and the chorus of commentators who had been waiting to declare Meta's attempt a failure began warming up their keyboards.
Today, Threads has just announced 500 million monthly active users, accompanied by a meaningful cluster of new features centered on community building, feed personalization, and real-time conversation. Starting with "Your Algo", which builds on the earlier "Dear Algo" feature, and allows users to privately tell Threads what topics they want to see more or less of in their feed, with adjustable time windows of one, three, or seven days.
For most of the history of social media, the relationship between a user and the algorithm that governed their experience was opaque. The algorithm decided what you saw, based on signals you generated through your behavior and then served you more of whatever produced those signals. "Your Algo" breaks that unilateral relationship by introducing a formal channel for explicit user preference; not inferred from behavioral signals but stated directly, with temporal specificity, in private. The fact that requests can be set for one, three, or seven days is crucial because users' needs shift constantly, making permanent preferences an imperfect fit.
The graduation of Communities out of beta, accompanied by a meaningful set of new capabilities, is the other story, including: a new Communities Hub which brings communities into the main navigation menu, custom community icons, champion recognition, a Community Progress feature, and the expansion of Live Chats to more communities (with co-hosting capabilities and the ability to quote moments directly to the feed).
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