Option to Customize “River Content” in Threads
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that the social platform Threads will now offer users more “customization options” to switch between modes and see the community content they prefer.
Zuckerberg pointed out that this new feature is currently in the testing phase and will allow users to choose between “For You,” “Following,” or “Custom Feeds,” providing users with greater flexibility in usage and solving the previous limitation of only seeing single recommended feeds.
Zuckerberg stated that users who enable the testing feature can easily set their default displayed feeds through a simple operation. Users only need to open the application, click and long-press the tabs located above the feeds on the feed page, and then select the “Edit Feeds” option. Users can then sort their feeds and place the most frequently used ones at the top, setting them as the default content displayed every time the application is opened.
Zuckerberg stated that Meta will continue to observe feedback and hopes to expand this feature to more users. In other words, Threads’ algorithm content recommendation mechanism may be facing its biggest overhaul since its inception.
Viewing in Threads
The question is, why did Threads suddenly announce the update and optimize the community user experience now, after almost a year and a half since its launch on July 5, 2023, and with over 275 million monthly active users as of October 2024? The answer may be related to the influx of a large number of “community refugees” in the United States.
Influx of Community Refugees Intensifies Competition in New Social Platforms
According to the foreign media Axios, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed that from November 1 to November 26, within a few weeks, Threads had already gained 35 million new users. Going back to November 14, the number of new user registrations was at least 15 million. And on a daily basis, Threads had over 1 million new registrations in the past three months.
Even Bluesky, a new social media platform founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has seen a large influx of new users since the U.S. presidential election on November 5. As of last week, the platform had reached 20 million users. According to Similarweb data, the usage of Bluesky has grown at least fivefold within two weeks after November 5.
According to Platformer, Bluesky surpassed 22 million users by November 25. To cope with the surge in new users, Bluesky plans to expand its content moderation team from 25 to 100 people to maintain a healthy community environment.
With the rise of competitors like Bluesky, Threads has been continuously improving its user experience to meet market challenges. Recently, Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, confirmed that Threads will adjust the recommendation algorithm for “For You” to focus more on accounts that users are actually interested in, rather than excessive recommendations from “strangers.” He also revealed that Threads will soon allow users to search posts within a specific date range.
Viewing in Threads
Additionally, users can now view videos in landscape mode within the app. Previously, even when clicking on a video to enter full-screen mode, the app couldn’t rotate horizontally and could only be viewed in portrait mode. Now, with the latest app update, users can view photos/videos in landscape mode.
This article is authorized and reprinted from “Digital Times.”
The initial draft of this article was generated by AI, and it was organized, edited by Li Xiantai.