Adam Mosseri Says Threads Will Now Show You More of the Stuff You Have Said You Are Interested in Seeing ⇥ threads.net

Adam Mosseri in a Threads post:

We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today. For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. This is definitely a work in progress – balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky – thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming.

I read this as more of an apologetic concession than an actual strategy change, and that struck me as odd. Would the Threads team not be glad to deliver to users what they have elected to see, instead of doing a whole bunch of math to badly guess at stuff they might be interested in? The language here is weird, too; Mosseri immediately focuses on the metrics.

However, I think this accurately represents how Threads is viewed. Look at the replies to Mosseri’s post and — while I do not want to imply there is a consistent theme — there are lots of people who are leaning on recommendations with the objective of growing their following and reach, and they are worried. These are the people who see social media as a place for furthering their brand. They are not interesting. The only way they are able to grow their audience is by treating a recommendations algorithm as a problem to be solved.

Mosseri did not say suggested posts would be eliminated from the For You feed, only that the balance would shift. From my experience with it today, it really seems to be better. About half the posts are from accounts I follow, and the rest are proximate to things I care about. It feels completely different from the Threads of a week ago. It is actually — dare I say it? — not bad. At least, that is the case right now. I bet Threads next month will feel entirely changed again.