With Twitter clone Bluesky on the rise, that’s seemingly spurred Threads into action, with Meta’s own Twitter-like app rolling out a range of updates that seem to be specifically designed to address concerns which many have cited as reasons as to why they find Bluesky more appealing.
Earlier this week, Threads rolled out custom, keyword-based feeds to all users, a much requested feature, while it’s now also prompting users to review their political content settings.
Which, in the wake of the U.S. election, is now a less risky element, and active prompts like this could help to address user requests to make the app a more real-time feed of updates, of all kinds.
And today, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has announced another change that could make Threads feel even more like Twitter past.
As per Mosseri:
“We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today.”
This has been another element of Threads that many have criticized in comparison to Bluesky, that you can’t default to the “Following” feed on Threads. That’s because algorithmic recommendations drive a lot more engagement, which, in turn, also makes following, as a concept, less relevant in the modern social media landscape.
But many Threads users have complained that they’ve been struggling to grow their audience in the app, so the Threads team is now trying to address this, by putting more emphasis on followers, and making following a stronger driver of reach.
Which could have benefits in helping users build their own audience in the app, but it will also impact overall engagement on Threads.
Which Mosseri also acknowledges:
“For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up.”
Mosseri further notes that this is “a work in progress” and as “balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky”.
Because, again, Meta has seen significant engagement increases on both Facebook and IG (and presumably Threads) due to the insertion of AI-recommended posts from profiles that you don’t follow, which now make up 50% of the content in people’s Instagram feeds.
So Meta would seemingly be making this move begrudgingly, in order to address concerns raised by users. And while Bluesky currently only has a fraction of Threads’ audience (20 million users versus 275 million on Threads), there has clearly been a significant rise in interest in the rival app, which, again, does seem to be pushing the Threads team to reassess their approach to some degree.
Though it won’t be switching to a full chronological feed of posts from profiles that you’ve chosen to follow as the default. The “Following” feed will remain secondary, because again, Meta knows that its algorithmic “For You” feed drives more engagement.
But really, that’s the key element that Threads needs, because right now, it lacks the freshness that Twitter once did, that real time pulse feel, where the constantly updating stream of tweets kept you connected to the latest events and happenings in your world, and your topics of interest.
Unfortunately for former Twitter users, that era has now passed, because of the popularity of algorithmic feeds. Sure, Threads could enable users to default to the “Following” stream, but as Mosseri notes, engagement would decline. Pushing a stream of the most engaging posts, aligned to your interests, is a bigger winner for the app.
But it is different from what Twitter had once been.
That’s not to say that it’s better, as a lot of the recommended posts you get served are time-wasting junk. But more time spent equals more ad exposure for Meta, and it’d be difficult for Meta to ignore that in order to refocus on a pure “Following” feed instead.
But if it did, that would be the thing that really enables users to build their own audiences in the app. If you had to follow a profile to see their posts, and effectively curate your own feed, follower counts would inevitably go up, and fast, which would be a major step towards re-creating that Twitter feel, and winning over top creators.
But instead, Meta’s going to try some compromise measures, which won’t be the same, but may address at least some creator concerns around follower counts.
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