[HN Gopher] How the new Threads app is made ___________________________________________________________________ How the new Threads app is made Author : maxptop Score : 123 points Date : 2023-07-07 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.emergetools.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.emergetools.com) | dahwolf wrote: | [flagged] | WinstonSmith84 wrote: | With 1b people, you've just qualified 15% of the planet as | "obnoxious, superficial, bottom of the barrel culture, cheap, | narcissistic, lacking any depth.". | | I'm not sure why you'd exclude Facebook users though, that's 3b | or 40% of all humans. | | Earth is beyond salvageable | hotdogscout wrote: | short form social media is an industrial farm of mental | illness. it surrounds you with histrionics with all the time | possible to spare, minimal commitment and inundates your | monkey-brained need for peer approval with their low standards. | | leaving leftist online spaces was the decision that had the | most positive impact on my life. any community based around a | struggle will have a hard time not being a pit of vindictive | envy regardless of ideology. | astrange wrote: | I don't think leftists are really that associated with short- | form writing, haven't you seen the jokes about "leftist | memes"?[0] | | They were on Twitter because they left Tumblr, which was | long-form. | | [0] the joke is they have pages of text on them | hotdogscout wrote: | Tumblr leftism was much more contained though, it was hard | to peer pressure targets and journalists outside the scene | looking for easy stories had no ability to reproduce the | gossip and slander. | | Twitter's mechanics are a shouting competition, with 10% of | users making up 90% of tweets, while giving users | tremendous power over public figure's profiles. It turned | leftist discourse into a more violent /r9k/ with a minority | skin and corporate backing. I don't think the move towards | a short-form platform had a non-trivial influence in this | shift. | sushid wrote: | > Which has an obnoxious, superficial, bottom of the barrel | culture. Cheap, narcissistic, lacking any depth. | | Ah yes, very different from the core Twitter userbase. /s | jheriko wrote: | amazing how massive they made it with so little functionality | | classic shitware | tezza wrote: | $ perl -p -i -e 's/twitter/meta/g' `find ./ -type f` $ make | $ make install | epistasis wrote: | The accusation that Threads is using stolen code is one of the | more embarrassing accusation for Musk that he's made. Not as | embarrassing for Musk as the fabricated pedophile accusations, | but definitely incredibly cringe. | | The idea of stealing code for large distributed systems build | on entirely different underlying compute architectures just | shows how technologically clueless Musk is. Might as well | measure productivity by lines of code written. Major pointy- | haired boss vibes. | fmajid wrote: | I've written against the Facebook Graph API and Twitter's. | Facebook was rock-solid (although they tightened it after | Cambridge Analytica to the point it no longer supported my | use-case), Twitter couldn't go two weeks without a failure or | regression of some sort. Gave me strong contempt for | Twitter's engineering culture and I suspect Meta would know | this as well. As a former CTO and hiring manager, I'd | certainly consider a stint at Twitter on a candidate's resume | as a black mark. | [deleted] | londons_explore wrote: | > ig_signals_cupid_better_recall_v1.mlmodelc | | Are they using on-device ML? Why? | nwallin wrote: | They're probably just _using_ an already trained model. They | 're almost certainly not _training_ a model on-device. | | AFAIK both the iphone and the pixel have a chip that are | specifically designed to do forward propagation on a deep | neural network. I don't know much about them though. | londons_explore wrote: | True - but what model would they want to use on-device? | | All the feed ranking stuff is done serverside I assume... And | apart from that, the app is just for posting and reading text | and pictures. I don't really see any use for any ML there. | tempest_ wrote: | All sorts of crap like facial recognition or object | identification. | | Every bit of ML you can offload on your clients is one you | don't have to pay for. | [deleted] | hexage1814 wrote: | >Threads app is made | | Horribly. | elwell wrote: | How so? | [deleted] | synergy20 wrote: | Interested in knowing if they're made by native SDKs or React | Native or, unlikely flutter. | | will they do desktop apps? electronjs came to mind for that, yes | it's fat but it's the only one truly cross platform now. | | Not a IG, FB, Threads, Twitter user per se, just interested in | what stack Meta uses to build Threads, looks like a mix of | various pieces from their existing code base to me. | gravitronic wrote: | Any clues to what percentage is made with react native? | | https://www.threads.net/t/CuW_fXZOgPc/ would suggest to me the | answer is "not much" | maxptop wrote: | Hard to tell from just looking at the static analysis. The size | of Compose is relatively small compared to overall dex, but our | guess is that a lot of that has to do with sharing code with IG | moffkalast wrote: | Ah, so even the makers of React are not dogfooding it anymore. | Sounds about right. | elwell wrote: | Meta is not the target market for React Native. | gravitronic wrote: | s/React/React Native/ | | Pretty sure they're using it on web everywhere and IMHO | that's a decent choice when you need state management / DOM | updates. | | React Native is a whole other ball of mud, taking UI | decisions out of the main thread where phones want them to be | and delegating them into a bolted on javascript environment. | newhotelowner wrote: | I was told they use mostly for the ad platform and slow as | snail. | | And FB performance degrading every month. I mostly use FB | groups. | jeron wrote: | doing a writeup like Jane Manchun Wong on an app that Jane | Manchun Wong worked on | ketzo wrote: | off-topic, but since she's joining Meta to work on Threads, I | guess we proooobably won't be getting as many of her info- | dumps? kind of a bummer, love her stuff | enahs-sf wrote: | can someone explain to me why this is a separate app and not just | a view in Instagram? IG has the potential to be Meta's Wechat and | this seems like it does that journey a disservice. | keyle wrote: | Another offering. Another ad platform. They might merge if it | doesn't grow. | madeofpalk wrote: | Instagram has launched many other services as "just a view in | Instagram" that people did not use. | wbobeirne wrote: | Have there been any public plans for a fully featured web app? | Having it be read-only on the web is a non-starter for me. | hospitalJail wrote: | Facebook isnt going to be nice about this. They know they are | in a strong position here. | | Expect an addicting algorithm that is fueled by ragebait (and | if its anything like IG, coombait). The fact that it didn't | release with an ability to time-sort tells you everything you | need to know. Everyone knows how easy it is to sort by time, | especially when stakes are low. Its anti-consumer from day 1. | | The surge in people are likely influencers and people marketing | their companies trying to get ahead of the algorithm. We've all | learned the first ones to join a social media network are | winners. | | The people with novel ideas need to be convinced, and I'm not | sure these people are ready to come back to facebook. | Miraste wrote: | Why would they need people with novel ideas? Most users are | happy to consume reposts and influencer spam ad infinitum, | and they're probably the most monetizable segment. | extr wrote: | I don't think it's that sinister. Time based sorting is a bad | day 1 feature since nobody has much of a follow graph yet. | Forcing the algorithm is a good way to make sure your feed | feels "full" even if you're starting from zero. I don't like | the algorithm either, it's full of brands and spammy meme | pages that lifted their content over from IG. But in terms of | cold-starting a social graph, I get it. Plus they already | said they're going to add a chrono feed soon. | epolanski wrote: | I second the previous user, any lack of time-based sorting | means I'm gonna waste a lot of time (which is what Meta | wants). Been there with other socials, done that, not | interested. | mowse_winded wrote: | I thought it pulled your social graph from Instagram. | astrange wrote: | It offers to, but nobody has posted anything yet, so a | follower-only timeline will need a week or two to get | content. | Freedom2 wrote: | What is 'coombait'? | astrange wrote: | Pictures of your female friends at the beach. | | If you leave Facebook for long enough and are a man, it'll | start sending you notifications anytime a woman you follow | posts something. (I don't know what it sends women.) | | That said, Instagram is actually not run like Facebook in | my experience, which is most of the reason Threads is part | of IG. | whiskeytuesday wrote: | What we used to call softcore pornography | the_lonely_road wrote: | Porn adjacent material. Technically SFW usually but not the | kind of thing you want your coworkers seeing you look at. | scarface_74 wrote: | And I don't understand why that is the first thing that | comes up on my Facebook feed when I scroll past reels. | | I usually watch and like comedians when I am mindlessly | scrolling. | standardUser wrote: | A strong position? They are going head-to-head with one of | the largest social networks and their odds are... OK at best. | They have _every_ incentive to make their new service as | desirable and accessible as possible (until such time they | are too big for people to leave and then they can do whatever | they want). | troupo wrote: | > They are going head-to-head with one of the largest | social networks | | Twitter has 450 million monthly active users at a generous | guess. | | Facebook's MAU: 2.98 _billion_ | | Instagram's MAU: 1 _billion_ | | Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to | social networks. | | Unlike most, Facebook actually knows how to build a social | network, and grow it. | wmeredith wrote: | > Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes | to social networks. By active users, yes Twitter is | smaller than many of the other big networks. But by | influence, Twitter is one of, if not the biggest fish in | the pond. @[username] is everywhere in advertising and | news programs. People don't break news on Facebook and | Instagram. There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ | 44 billion for Twitter, and it wasn't the revenue per | user. It was buying influence. | edmundsauto wrote: | The last year has significantly weakened Twitter's | position. Musk paid $44B for a company that was almost | immediately worth less; he has massively harmed it's | image for further valuation reduction. The recent "must | be logged in to view tweets" and "only X00 items | available" combined with the increase in hate speech | weakened it even further. | | Further, Twitter has laid off 75% of the people who could | help combat this push. | | You are describing Twitter from 2-3 years ago. It is not | is such a strong position now, and people are actively | looking for something else that provides similar | functionality. By bootstrapping from an existing social | graph, it's a really strong possibility this is Twitter's | death blow. | Kbelicius wrote: | > There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion | for Twitter | | Not really considering they desperately tried to get out | of buying it. | coolbreezetft22 wrote: | I'm not even getting read-only on the web, as of this morning | it just redirects me to the main page which does nothing? | gregw134 wrote: | On top of that, when you download the app there's only an | option to login with instagram. If you don't have an | instagram account already there's no link to create an | account. Surprisingly inconvenient. | joemi wrote: | There are read-only web links for users and posts. The | easiest way to see it is by copying a link to a user or post | from within the app. But there doesn't seem to be a web | landing/browse/feed page yet (besides the main page that just | gives a QR code linking to the app). | pootusmaximus wrote: | Yes | | > the priority is the mobile apps, but we are working on www | | https://www.threads.net/t/CuWp3eMNE8h | dylan604 wrote: | It's probably a non-starter for Meta since your non-use of an | app that can siphon all sorts of precious "meta" about you for | them to profit from is not available. | jonny_eh wrote: | https://www.instagram.com/ is a thing, so I imagine it's just a | matter of time. I can't disagree with their choice of releasing | for mobile first in 2023 though. | kelsolaar wrote: | > Threads has one of the largest plugins we've ever seen. | BarcelonaShareExtension is 81 MB. For context, the largest | Instagram plugin - InstagramNotificationExtension is 23.5 MB. | TheInstagramShareExtension is 5.6 MB | | Out of a 244.2 MB App on iOS. | ra wrote: | "Just ship it already" ... dependency bloat is not a valid | complaint for a new product. | tough wrote: | Why the heck would they need an extension to share "Barcelona" | Are we talking the whole city map or like wut | cpeterso wrote: | "Barcelona" is the code name of the Threads project. The | Threads Android app is called "com.instagram.barcelona". | [deleted] | buildbot wrote: | What could it possibly need that much code for | kyleyeats wrote: | All the other stuff it did when it was the prior project | called Threads from a couple years ago. | [deleted] | maxptop wrote: | Would be surprised if this extension doesn't shrink in a | subsequent release | arcticbull wrote: | Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They | likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, | which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it | used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and | the binary size shrink will look good on someone's | performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like | this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real | impact on usage. | | Let's be honest, nobody cares how big it is, so long as it | doesn't force you to download over WiFi. Nobody sorts the App | Store by 'size.' It's more important in the initial release | to prove product market fit rather than spending time | whittling down the share extension. | | They made the right call to get to market fast. | coldcode wrote: | They are missing substantial features like hashtags and | follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. | That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M | people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much | is missing, unless it's in there but not production | quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now | there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing | features quickly, never a good plan. | epistasis wrote: | Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. | Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of | users to interact with. | | Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of | your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship | without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be | stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire | users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts. | | A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability | to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability | to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already | does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far | better viewing. | wouldbecouldbe wrote: | Hahah I love the bias here. | | Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going | to hell. | | Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP | that fast. | jeromegv wrote: | What has Musk shipped exactly that benefits non-blue | users? | arcticbull wrote: | The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. | Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension | it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a | staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is | probably 15-20 people proving a concept. | | The dissonance you're pointing out is Twitter is being | mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when | it certainly didn't need to. It's the stick in the spokes | meme in corporate form. | | Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a | company that very much isn't - and notably one that | hasn't shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 | products. | | Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching | Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad | job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter. | epistasis wrote: | Isn't it far more biased to assume that anything Musk | ships is good? | | Features and shipping should be evaluated empirically by | results, not by deciding a priori that the decision maker | is good or bad. | | So I think you might be projecting a bit with your bias. | And for that matter, I didn't even mention Musk's changes | at all, yet you seem to be grouping me in with people | that have! (But for the record, I preferred the feature | set of Twitter before Musk started changing things. | Still, the feature changes are still a loooot less | important than the user base. And by prioritizing replies | by paying versus non-paying customers, the user base that | I experience on Twitter has gone down in quality by a | ton, meaning that it is far less useful. That and | shutting down the site for a few days and letting me | experience zero of the user base-or rather a feed refresh | two reply threads before 600 tweets were hit-was | completely boneheaded. Stupid. B-player move. | paganel wrote: | > They are missing substantial features like hashtags and | follows | | Indeed, they have. How the heck do you find anything? On | the web thingie I could find no search bar, to say | nothing of the hashtags that have not been implemented | (?!). And, somehow, there are people here taking their | side on this. Like, what the heck, how can you launch a | social media app in this day and age with almost no | discoverability? | deanCommie wrote: | > My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there | is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing | features quickly, | | So, like every other first version of a software or | hardware release, from Facebook to the iPhone? | | > never a good plan. | | Sure, the history of those decisions is littered with | tech-debt-ridden corpses, but likewise is also how every | success starts it's way. | | It might not be a good plan for employee work-life | balance, but in a tech recession where noone is hiring, | it's a GREAT plan. | wouldbecouldbe wrote: | Honestly threads is so minimum. A solo dev can pull this off in | half a year. Only thing complicated is scale. But meta has that | in place. Threads team is a corporate cushion team. | Infinitesimus wrote: | > A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. > Only thing | complicated is scale | | So, a solo dev cannot, in fact, pull this off. | lern_too_spel wrote: | 72 MB is egregious for a Twitter-clone MVP. For comparison, the | full-featured Twitter app itself is 40 MB. The Mastodon app | weighs in at 1.6 MB. | 999900000999 wrote: | The target consumer doesn't care, wasting time optimizing for | space doesn't make sense in this instance . | | I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native | here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately | own the React Native project. | akira2501 wrote: | > The target consumer doesn't care | | The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this | way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not | sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's | point of view, more like a "digital subscriber." | colesantiago wrote: | This didn't stop 70M+ users from downloading the app and using | it. | | Nobody cares. | troupo wrote: | People care. You just refuse to listen to what they say. | | They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my | battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million | other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't | hear because they can only hear when someone talks about | megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc. | fmajid wrote: | They may make a "Lite" version of the app like they did for | Facebook or WhatsApp, but Twitter's user base is much less | developing world heavy, so I doubt it. This was clearly a | skunkworks project, once it is established, it will get | more resources including optimization specialists. Then | again, Twitter, being the abode of bro-grammers, never got | it and Musk had a point when he fired most of the team. | MisterSandman wrote: | > my internet cap is reached | | 1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very | high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue | that HackerNews makes it out to be. | | 2. Threads' main user base is Instagram. An hour of | watching Instagram Reels is more data than the entire | Threads app. I highly doubt Instagram users are data | strapped. | | > "my battery is drained faster" | | App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained | out. If you're saying Threads is not optimized, I disagree. | And again, considering the main targeted user base is | Instagram and Twitter, Threads is going to be significantly | better than either app in terms of battery life (little to | no video options right now) | | > "my phone is slow" | | Same as above, basically. | CaptainFever wrote: | > 1. The vast majority of the world now has access to | very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big | issue that HackerNews makes it out to be. | | Source? This seems like a really first-world country | thing to say. | enneff wrote: | Ironically, IME there tend to be fewer data restrictions | in developing countries than developed ones. | kyawzazaw wrote: | Really doubt the target users are gonna blame on this | Freedom2 wrote: | Precisely. I had a friend who downloaded an app, but it was | 2kb over the limit that he prefers to have all his apps! He | promptly deleted it and left a scathing review. Naturally | this picked up and a few other users refused to download | the app. | shadowgovt wrote: | It's really hard to hear what they say over the sound of | 70M+ downloads. Actions speak a lot louder than words. | | "The customer is always right in matters of taste." | timeon wrote: | > 70M+ downloads | | Downloads are one thing. People are curious. Will they | keep it? | throwaway42401 wrote: | 72MB isn't stopping people downloading it. If they later | decide to delete, it will be because the UX is bad, or | lack of content, or something like that. Nobody says "I | use this every day but I need 72MB, delete" and nobody | says "this app sucks but it's only 10MB, might as well | keep it". | tredre3 wrote: | > The Mastodon app weighs in at 1.6 MB. | | The official Mastodon app weighs in at 70MB on my iOS device | right now. | | The store listing puts it at 58MB: | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/i... | lern_too_spel wrote: | All of my figures are for Android. None of the app sizes will | match on iOS. | constantly wrote: | No prob, my phone has a terabyte of hard drive space and many | gbs of memory. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-07 23:00 UTC)