Instagram Threads is rolling out the ability for users to signal which sort of posts they wanted to see more or less of by swiping.
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Threads, Meta’s Twitter/X competitor and the company’s first bet on decentralized social media, is now making it easier for users to control their Threads experience. After launching a customizable dashboard interface last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Monday that the app is now rolling out the ability for users to signal which sort of posts they wanted to see more or less of.
Users would “swipe right on a post to like it, or swipe left to show you’re not interested,” Mosseri explained in a post on Threads. “We’ll use those signals to show you more posts like the ones you swipe right on and fewer of those you swipe left on.”
The idea to use a swipe gesture to indicate interest is a user interface interaction that recalls dating apps like Tinder, but the ability to train an algorithm about what sort of things people like could help Threads more quickly get up-to-speed on personalizing users’ For You feeds. TikTok, for example, uses a similar mechanism by allowing users to mark videos as “not interested,” and X does the same for posts.
Across Threads’ competitors, there are a number of different approaches to how content should be delivered. X uses a more traditional social media algorithm that leverages likes and engagement patterns alongside other metrics to determine what sort of content people would like to see. On the flip side, the startup Bluesky, originally incubated inside Twitter (now X), offers a “choose your own algorithm” model where users can customize feeds to their liking or follow prebuilt feeds like “What’s Hot” or “Popular with Friends” to view the network’s content in the way they prefer instead.
Well-designed For You feeds, however, can increase engagement and time spent with an app — areas Meta is looking to improve with Threads.
Though Meta’s newest app today counts more than 150 million monthly active users, for comparison, Elon Musk claims X now has 600 million monthly active users, 300 million of whom use the platform daily. (He doesn’t indicate what portion of that user base consists of automated accounts or spam, though — and as X is no longer a publicly reported company, the numbers can’t be externally verified.) Still, it’s fair to say that Threads has further to go to catch up with X, though it’s outpacing Bluesky’s 5.7 million users and Mastodon’s 7.2 million, less than 1 million of whom are active on a monthly basis at present.
Threads first began testing the side-swiping gesture to signal interest in posts in March, where swiping one way would reveal a heart icon and the other would display an icon of an eye with a line crossed over it — a symbol typically used for “hide” or “hidden.”
While Threads today says it will use the swipes to help users customize their own feeds, the signals Meta collects could be put to a larger purpose over time. With enough data, the swipes could also help the company determine what posts are popular versus those that are largely being “downvoted” (swiped left on) by the community. This could help the app’s For You algorithm more quickly improve.
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