Meta has revealed this afternoon its strong card to compete with Twitter. Threads was born this Wednesday, a day earlier than planned, amid great expectations and the endless chaos that exists on the platform acquired by Elon Musk. The new application, minimalist in style, is available in a hundred countries, although at the moment it does not have a launch date in the European Union because it does not comply with the privacy requirements of Brussels. Threads is linked to Instagram, the popular photo and video platform, which has more than 1.6 billion users. Having it is a requirement for Threads.
Instagram’s massive audience is one of its main strengths in the competition with Twitter. “It will take time, but there must be a public conversations app with over a billion users. Twitter has had the opportunity to be, but has not succeeded. Hopefully we do, ”Zuckerberg wrote in one of his first conversations.
The 39-year-old technological entrepreneur has been in charge of welcoming the new creation of Meta, whose symbol is an at symbol that also resembles an ear. “I’m glad that all of you are here from day one. Let’s build something great together!” Wrote the businessman, who has challenged Musk to a bare-knuckle fight at a place and date yet to be determined. Zuckerberg has said that the goal is to “create an open and friendly public space to carry on a conversation.” Underscoring the significance of the launch, Zuckerberg took to Twitter to launch the first message from him in more than a decade. He decided to post an image where Spiderman points to a doppelganger, a popular meme that makes fun of exact copies.
The businessman launched his first thread two days ago, during the testing period carried out by Instagram. His first public message received more than 13,000 hearts in a few minutes, which gives an idea of the volume of accounts that have joined the new app on the day it was released. The first users of Threads who browsed its timeline were able to find that several brands and some media, mainly American, were already there before users could write, post photos and videos.
Comparisons with Twitter have flooded the new social network in the first minutes after launch. One of Thread’s engineers wryly wrote that they are “generous” and will allow users to see more than 600 posts a day. “We think they have the right,” Jessel said, referring to the limit that Elon Musk imposed on the number of tweets that users who do not subscribe to the Twitter Blue service, which costs $115 a year, can see. Unlike other platforms, Threads has not enabled a direct message box to keep a discussion open and allows posts of up to 500 characters.
Adam Mosseri, the director of Instagram, has asked users to be kind to maintain the constructive tone that they want to be present on the network. He also gave some clues to debug conversations or topics. Threads uses some of the moderation filters used by Instagram. The Hidden Words function allows you to hide words or phrases from responses if someone is being harassed or if your notification mailbox is saturated by the number of messages. Threads will share the same rules as Facebook or Instagram, which are more conservative than Twitter, a network that allows nudity and even pornographic videos. For example, you will not be able to see images of nudes or female nipples, one of the oldest controversies of the Silicon Valley giant. “We have no philosophical qualms against nudity, just that we can’t verify the age of users or their consent, which causes a security problem,” Mosseri replied to a user who asked him.
New user messages are accompanied by four buttons: like, comment, repost (or quote), and share. The last function even allows you to post the Threads message on Twitter. At the moment, the hashtags do not exist, although they will be available soon, according to the developers. Can’t search for posts either, only users. Mosseri said that the team is working on editing messages, one of the recurring requests made to Twitter and that is available for a fee.
The tech giant has warned users that what they have seen may change in the coming days or weeks. One of the main changes will be advertising. This Wednesday browsing the new platform was reminiscent of Twitter in its early years because everything was messages and there are no ads. Meta, which makes much of its revenue from selling its users’ browsing information, is unlikely to keep it ad-free.
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