{"id":357177,"date":"2025-12-19T02:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T02:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/357177\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T02:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T02:19:09","slug":"threads-wants-to-be-the-app-you-cant-wait-to-open-in-the-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/357177\/","title":{"rendered":"Threads wants to be the app you can\u2019t wait to open in the morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/p>\n

By all measures, Meta\u2019s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple\u2019s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content.\u201d<\/p>\n

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta\u2019s other platforms. \u201cWe do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what\u2019s going on in Threads,\u201d Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. \u201cWe do a bunch of work to get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,\u201d Hayes explained.<\/p>\n

Hayes, who helped launch Threads initially and was named its head in September, has been focused on clarifying the platform\u2019s identity. In our conversation, he said the goal for Threads is to be \u201cthe place on the internet to talk about what\u2019s going on in the world.\u201d Practically, that means going vertical by vertical \u2014 sports, entertainment, news \u2014 and tipping both creators and consumers toward using the app more.<\/p>\n

When it comes to competitors, Hayes is focused on more than just X. \u201cReddit has a ton of activity that is analogous to what happened on Twitter in the early days,\u201d he said. \u201cDiscord has a bunch of these big group chat-style communities.\u201d He acknowledged Twitter, now X, as \u201cthe app that pioneered the core format,\u201d but made clear that the battle for real-time conversation is crowded.<\/p>\n

A traffic channel for creators<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no direct monetization for creators on Threads right now. Hayes is pitching something different: Threads as a traffic channel to other platforms where creators actually get paid.<\/p>\n

The clearest example is podcasts. Threads recently launched a feature that renders show and episode links from platforms like Spotify and lets users pin them to their profiles. Hayes said Threads is open to other partnerships with platforms like Substack and Patreon as well. But there\u2019s no plan to let creators paywall content directly on Threads or to share ad revenue like YouTube.<\/p>\n

Ads are coming, but slowly<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Threads is testing ads in four countries, including the US, but the load is deliberately light, Hayes told me. \u201cWe are ramping the ad load up steadily over the course of the next year,\u201d he said, \u201cbut only doing it when we feel like there\u2019s enough value on the consumer side of the app to justify doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Controlling the algorithm<\/p>\n

Threads is testing a new feature called \u201cDear Algo\u201d in a handful of countries. Users can ask to see more or less of a topic, share their algorithm prompt for others to use or remix, and have their personalized feed adjust to the prompt for three days. \u201cAfter a heartbreaking loss of your sports team, you can be like, don\u2019t show me NFL content for three days,\u201d Hayes said. \u201cBut you\u2019ll be ready on day four to come back in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The broader point: content understanding has gotten better thanks to LLMs. \u201cWe now don\u2019t just know that a thing is about basketball. We know that it\u2019s the 1998 NBA Finals, and it\u2019s this player taking a shot for this team.\u201d That precision is what makes this kind of algorithm steering possible. Hayes has been surprised by how specific early user requests are with prompts like, \u201cshow me more football content, but not Patrick Mahomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fediverse is on maintenance mode<\/p>\n

Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that it\u2019s not a top priority for the current roadmap. \u201cIt\u2019s something that we\u2019re supporting, it\u2019s something that we\u2019re maintaining, but it\u2019s not the thing that we\u2019re talking about that\u2019s gonna help the app break out,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who has built a zillion consumer products, it\u2019s just really hard to keep these divergent platforms and products consistent on the same protocol over time,\u201d he explained. \u201cThere\u2019s always going to be the trade-offs that these companies are thinking about of how much energy do I want to pour into compatibility with this ecosystem versus iterating on this thing I\u2019m building and seeing what\u2019s valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prioritizing timeliness but not news<\/p>\n

Threads used to be mocked for how it would surface old content. Now, the app prioritizes recommending content from the last 24 hours, according to Hayes. \u201cIf something is four or five days old, even if it\u2019s really good, we probably won\u2019t show that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike X<\/a>, Hayes said Threads isn\u2019t making a push to get more journalists and publishers on the app. \u201cWe just look at it like any other vertical, which is that there are certain creators who are really good at this and know a lot about it. There are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content.\u201d He said Threads isn\u2019t downranking news, but it\u2019s \u201cnot one of the focus verticals right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

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