Threads, Meta's Twitter/X rival and the company's first bet on decentralized social media, is making it easier for users to control their Threads experience. After unveiling a customizable dashboard interface last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Monday that the app is rolling out a feature that lets users know what types of posts they want to see more of, or less of.
Users “swipe right on a post to like it or swipe left to indicate they're not interested,” Mosseri explained in a post on the thread. “We use these signals to show you more posts similar to the ones you've swiped right on and less posts you've swiped left on.”
The idea of indicating interest with a swipe gesture is a user interface interaction that recalls dating apps like Tinder, but the ability to train the algorithm on what people like could help Threads personalize users' For You feeds more quickly. TikTok, for example, uses a similar mechanism by allowing users to mark videos as “not interested,” and X does the same for posts.
Threads' competitors have different approaches to how they deliver content: X uses a more traditional social media algorithm that leverages likes and engagement patterns, among other metrics, to determine what kind of content people want to see, while Bluesky (now X), a startup that originally grew out of Twitter, offers a “choose your own algorithm” model, allowing users to customize their feed to their preferences or follow pre-built feeds like “What's Hot” and “Popular with Friends” to view content from their networks the way they prefer.
However, a well-designed “For You” feed can increase engagement and time spent in the app, an area Meta is looking to improve with Threads.
Meta's latest app now has over 150 million monthly active users; for comparison, Elon Musk claims that X now has 600 million monthly active users, with 300 million of them using the platform daily (though he won't say how much of that user base consists of automated accounts or spam, and because X is no longer a public company, the numbers can't be externally verified). Still, it's fair to say that Threads has some way to go to catch up with X, although it does have more users than Bluesky's 5.7 million and Mastodon's 7.2 million, of which currently have less than 1 million monthly active users.
Threads began testing a sideways swipe gesture in March to indicate interest in a post: swiping in one direction reveals a heart icon, while swiping in the other direction reveals a crossed-eye icon, a symbol typically used to mean “hidden” or “concealed.”
Threads says today it will use swipes to help users customize their feed, but the signals Meta collects could be used for bigger purposes over time. With enough data, swipes could also help determine which posts are popular and which are “disliked” (swiped left) by the community, which could help improve the app's “recommendation” algorithm more quickly.