The logo of Threads, the social network that Meta launched on July 5th. Richard Drew (AP)
Meta revealed its strong cards in the competition with Twitter this afternoon. Threads was born this Wednesday, a day ahead of schedule, amid great expectations and the endless chaos that reigns daily on the platform acquired by Elon Musk. The new minimalist-style text app is available in 100 countries and linked to Instagram, the popular photo and video sharing platform that has more than 1.6 billion users worldwide. That large audience is one of its key strengths when it comes to competing with Twitter. “It will take time, but there needs to be a public speaking app with over a billion users. Twitter had the opportunity to do this, but it didn’t succeed. “Hopefully we do,” Zuckerberg wrote in one of the first Threads conversations.
The 39-year-old tech entrepreneur was in charge of welcoming Meta’s new creation, whose symbol is an at symbol that also resembles an ear. “I am delighted that you have all been here from day one. Let’s build something great together,” wrote the businessman, who has challenged Musk to an open battle, the location and date of which have yet to be determined. Zuckerberg said the goal of the new network is to “create a friendly, open public space for conversation.” To underscore the importance of the release, Zuckerberg took to Twitter to post his first message in more than a decade. To do this, he chose an image of Spiderman pointing at a doppelganger, a popular meme that pokes fun at exact copies.
The businessman started his first thread two days ago, during Instagram’s testing phase. Its first public message has garnered more than 13,000 hearts in just minutes, giving a sense of the number of accounts that have joined the new app on the day of its release. The first users of Threads who searched their timeline could see that several brands and some media, mainly American, were already there before users could write.
Comparisons with Twitter flooded the new social network in the first few minutes after launch. One of Thread’s engineers wryly wrote that they were “generous” and would allow users to see more than 600 posts a day. “We believe they have a right to it,” Jessel said, referring to Elon Musk’s limit on the number of tweets that users who aren’t subscribed to the Twitter Blue service, which costs $115 per tweet, can see year costs. Unlike other platforms, Threads hasn’t enabled a direct message box to keep an open discussion.
Adam Mosseri, the director of Instagram, has asked users to keep the constructive tone they want to be present on the network. He also gave some keys for debugging conversations or topics. Threads uses some of the moderation filters used by Instagram. The Hidden Words feature allows you to hide words or phrases from replies when someone is being harassed or your notification inbox is overloaded by the number of messages. Threads follow the same rules as Facebook or Instagram, which are more conservative than Twitter, a network that allows nudity and even pornographic videos. For example, you won’t be able to see pictures of nudes or female nipples, one of the Silicon Valley giant’s oldest controversies. “We don’t have any philosophical concerns about nudity, just that we can’t verify users’ ages or their consent, which is a security issue,” Mosseri replied to a user who asked him.
New user messages are accompanied by four buttons: Like, Comment, Repost (or Quote), and Share. The last feature even lets you post the Threads message to Twitter. Currently, the hashtags don’t exist, although according to the developers, they will be available soon. It is also not possible to search for articles, only for users. Mosseri said the team is working on editing messages, one of Twitter’s recurring requests, which is available for a fee.
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