Threads, Meta’s Twitter/X competitor and the company’s first bet on decentralized social media, now makes it easier for users to control their Threads experience. After launching a customizable dashboard interface last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Monday that the app is now rolling out the ability for users to indicate what types of posts they want to see more or less of.
Users would “swipe right on a post to like it, or swipe left to show you’re not interested,” Mosseri explained in a message on Topics. “We use these signals to show you more messages, like those you swipe right, and fewer messages you swipe left.”
The idea of using a swipe gesture to indicate interest is a user interface interaction reminiscent of dating apps like Tinder, but the ability to train an algorithm about what kinds of things people like would be Threads can help you get up to speed faster on personalizing users’ For You feeds. For example, TikTok uses a similar mechanism by allowing users to mark videos as “not interested,” and X does the same for posts.
Among Threads’ competitors, there are a number of different approaches to how content should be delivered. X uses a more traditional social media algorithm that uses likes and engagement patterns among other metrics to determine what kind of content people would like to see. On the other hand, the startup Bluesky, originally incubated in Twitter (now ‘Popular with Friends’. to view the network’s content in the way they prefer.
However, well-designed For You feeds can increase engagement and time spent with an app – areas Meta wants to improve with Threads.
Although Meta’s latest app has more than 150 million monthly active users today, Elon Musk claims that X now has 600 million monthly active users, of which 300 million use the platform daily. (He doesn’t specify what portion of that user base consists of automated accounts or spam, though — and since to go to overtake X, even though it goes faster Bluesky is 5.7 million users and Mastodon is 7.2 millionof which less than 1 million are currently active monthly.
Threads first started testing the side swipe gesture signal interest in messages in Marchwhere swiping in one direction would show a heart icon and in the other it would show an icon of an eye with a line across it – a symbol typically used for ‘hide’ or ‘hidden’.
While Threads says today that it will use the swipes to help users customize their own feeds, the signals Meta collects could be used for a larger purpose over time. With enough data, the swipes can also help the company determine which posts are popular and which posts are largely downvoted (swiped left) by the community. This could improve the app’s For You algorithm faster.
