Threaded Programming Skeptic Turned Advocate - Astounded by Recent Enhancements

Threads launched in July 2023, and 100 million people signed up in the first five days—I was one of them. Did I scroll it religiously? No. In fact, after my first week, it didn’t seem particularly usable. However, changes to the social media platform have turned my attitude around, and now I spend much more time there.

What is Instagram Threads?

Threads is a social media platform owned by Meta , and it operates a lot like X (formerly Twitter). You can write short messages with up to 500 characters that show up on your profile, plus other users’ feeds. It’s also very tightly tied to Instagram . You must use an Instagram account to create a Threads profile.

It seemed to come out of nowhere. In reality, the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk in late 2022 spurred Meta employees to fast track a new text app that lets people engage in public conversation. A lot of people, like me, flocked to the site looking for an alternative to Twitter given the rapid decline in content moderation and increase in bizarre ads.

The Following Feed Made the App Usable

When Threads first launched, you could follow people, but your home feed still showed posts from anyone on the site the algorithm decided you might like. This was really annoying and made it seem useless to follow anyone. You had to go to a particular user’s profile to see what, if anything, they’d posted.

Thankfully, the site received enough negative feedback about this omission that Threads added a “Following” feed by the end of July. Being able to limit posts to the people I choose to follow makes the site more practical and lets me ignore the memes of strangers that I’m not interested in.

You Can Add Tags Now

Threads’ tags act like Twitter hashtags, so now I can find content based on a particular topic (usually Vanderpump Rules). This feature rolled out in early December 2023 and changed the way I use the site for real-time events and looking up a particular show, sports event, or person. If you’re not familiar, a tag is a word or phrase that shows up like a clickable hyperlink that takes you to other posts with the same tag.

In my opinion, Threads’ tags still don’t scratch the same itch as Twitter or Instagram hashtags, but mainly because everyone isn’t using them yet, so clicking on one doesn’t always yield a ton of results. On the plus side, you can make tags pretty long. Allowing users to include multiple words, with spaces, as a tag makes me more inclined to explore them.

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In March 2024, Threads finally added a “Trending Topics” section on the search page. The list is generated by AI based on what users are most talking about right now. I had been missing this feature since my departure from Twitter, and it means I can finally go to Threads when I want to see more about a breaking news story.

Since there are only five items on the list, Threads is still not the best place for real-time news unless you intentionally follow news outlets or journalists. Still, having access to trending stories and tags makes it easier to catch up if I haven’t been on the app all day.

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GIFs Make Everything Better

You couldn’t add GIFs to a Threads post until October 2023. This made the site less entertaining, in my opinion. Now that people can add a GIF to their original post or react with one, the humor quotient has gone up quite a bit. Sometimes it’s the simple things that make you realize what you were missing.

Threads still has room for improvement (can we get DMs, already?) but the platform has shown a willingness to take user feedback and make things better. It’s also worth noting that you still need to have an Instagram account to use Threads. This wasn’t a big deal for me, but it could be really annoying for people who don’t like the ‘Gram.

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Threaded Programming Skeptic Turned Advocate - Astounded by Recent Enhancements