Threads wants to be the app you can’t wait to open in the morning

This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the technology industry, is only distributed to The Verge subscribers once a week.

By all accounts, Meta’s Threads had a very good year. The app was the second most downloaded iOS app of the year, behind only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly active users and 150 million daily active users.

This growth still comes mainly from other Meta platforms. “We’re doing a lot of work on Instagram and Facebook to show what’s happening at Threads,” Connor Hayes, president of Threads, told me this week. Rules of the game: Show personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, and then stop you needing those alerts to constantly check it. “We’re doing a bunch of work to keep people from relying on those promotions and waking up in the morning and just wanting to open the app,” Hayes explained.

Hayes, who helped launch Threads initially and was named its president in September, has focused on clarifying the platform’s identity. In our conversation, he said that the goal of Threads is to be “the place online to talk about what’s going on in the world.” In practice, this means moving one vertical after another — sports, entertainment, news — and steering both creators and consumers toward using the app more.

When it comes to competitors, Hayes focuses on more than just X. “Reddit has a lot of activity similar to what Twitter had in the early days,” he said. “Discord has a bunch of large group chat style communities.” He acknowledged Twitter, now X, as “the leading app in the basic format,” but explained that the battle for real-time conversation is crowded.

A traffic channel for creatives

There is no direct monetization for creators on Threads at this time. Hayes offers something different: topics as a traffic conduit to other platforms where creators actually get paid.

The most obvious example is podcasts. Threads recently launched a feature that displays links to shows and episodes from platforms like Spotify and allows users to pin them to their profiles. Threads is open to other partnerships with platforms like Substack and Patreon as well, Hayes said. But there’s no plan to allow creators to paywall content directly on Threads or share ad revenue like YouTube.

The ads are coming, but slowly

Meanwhile, Threads is testing ads in four countries, including the US, but the load is intentionally light, Hayes told me. “We are working to steadily increase ad loads over the next year, but we only do so when we feel there is enough value on the consumer side of the app to justify doing so,” he said.

Control the algorithm

Threads is testing a new feature called “Dear Algo” in a few countries. Users can request to see more or less of a topic, share their algorithmic prompts with others to use or remix, and set their personalized feed to prompt for three days. “After your sports team loses badly, you can say, ‘Don’t show me NFL content for three days,’” Hayes said. “But you’ll be ready on the fourth day to come back.”

Broader point: Understanding content has become better thanks to LLMs. “Now we don’t just know there’s something about basketball. We know it’s the 1998 NBA Finals, and this is a player who’s giving his all for this team.” This precision is what makes this type of algorithmic routing possible. Hayes was surprised by how specific early user requests were with prompts like, “Show me more football content, but not Patrick Mahomes.”

fediverse is in maintenance mode

Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that that’s not a top priority of the current roadmap. “It’s something we support, it’s something we maintain, but it’s not the thing we’re talking about that will help the app spread,” he said.

“As someone who has built millions of consumer products, it’s really difficult to keep these disparate platforms and products consistent on the same protocol over time,” he explained. “There are always going to be trade-offs that these companies think about about how much energy am I willing to put into fitting into this ecosystem versus replicating this thing that I’m building and seeing what’s valuable.”

Prioritize timing but not news

Topics were being mocked for how outdated the content looked. Now, the app prioritizes recommending content from the last 24 hours, according to Hayes. “If something is four or five days old, even if it’s really good, we probably won’t show it.”

Unlike XHayes said Threads is not making efforts to attract more journalists and publishers to the app. “We look at it like any other industry, which is that there are some creators who are good at this and know a lot about it. There are consumers who are hungry to consume content.” Threads is not downgrading news, but it is “not one of our focus sectors at the moment,” he said.