[HN Gopher] How the new Threads app is made
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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.
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