Threads, Meta’s Twitter/X competitor and the company’s first bet on decentralized social media, is now making it easier for users to control their Threads experience. After rolling out a customizable dashboard interface last week, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced Monday that the app now offers the ability for users to flag the kind of posts they want to see more or less of.
Users will “swipe right on a post to like it, or swipe left to show you’re not interested,” Mosheri explained to a post on Threads. “We’ll use these signals to show you more posts like the ones you swipe right on and less of the ones you swipe left on.”
The idea of using a swipe gesture to indicate interest is a UI interaction reminiscent of dating apps like Tinder, but the ability to train an algorithm on what kinds of things users like could help Threads get up to speed on personalization more quickly of users “For your food. TikTok, for example, uses a similar mechanism by allowing users to mark videos as “not interested” and X does the same for posts.
Across Threads’ competitors, there are a number of different approaches to how content is delivered. X uses a more traditional social media algorithm that leverages preferences and engagement patterns alongside other metrics to determine what kind of content people would like to see. On the other hand, startup Bluesky, which was originally incubated inside Twitter (now X), offers a “choose your own algorithm” model, where users can customize feeds to their liking or follow pre-made feeds such as “What’s Hot” or “Popular with Friends”. to view network content the way they prefer.
However, well-designed For You streams can increase engagement and time spent in an app—areas Meta wants to improve with Threads.
Although Meta’s latest app currently has more than 150 million monthly active users, by comparison, Elon Musk claims that X now has 600 million monthly active users, 300 million of whom use the platform daily. (It doesn’t indicate what portion of that user base is made up of automated accounts or spam, though — and since X is no longer a publicly traded company, the numbers can’t be externally verified.) Still, it’s fair to say that Threads should go even further to reach X, though it goes beyond Bluesky’s 5.7 million users and Mastodon’s 7.2 millionless than 1 million of which are active on a monthly basis right now.
Threads first started testing the side swipe gesture signal interest in positions in Marchwhere swiping one way would reveal a heart icon and the other would reveal an eye icon with a line crossed over it — a symbol commonly used for “hide” or “hidden.”
While Threads today says it will use swipes to help users customize their own threads, the signals Meta collects could be put to a bigger purpose over time. With enough data, hits could also help the company determine which posts are popular versus those that are heavily “downvoted” (left-shifted) by the community. This could help the app’s For You algorithm improve faster.
