I don't have an Instagram account so I tried to create one to try Threads. I used my real name and phone number but it was instantly banned as soon as it was created. I submitted an appeal, which required a selfie taken while holding a piece of paper with my username on it, which I provided. The next day I got an automated email that the selfie wasn't "acceptable" (no further elaboration) and that I was permanently banned from Instagram with no route for further appeal. So overall, not the most seamless onboarding experience I've ever seen.
They generally believe that nearly everyone living in a western nation will already be in their user database. Ie. your friends will have already uploaded your phone number to them, or you'll already have an account on one of their other products (Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram).
If you are an adult and they don't have any record of you, then you're probably a fraudster, bot, scammer, or someone else they don't want, so they ban you.
The way to get unbanned is to make sure at least 30 or so friends have your phone number in their contacts list synced to facebook, all with similar names, and then sign up to instagram with that phone number.
I'm guessing you signed up with a burner phone and email address... Well thats not what they want...
> The way to get unbanned is to make sure at least 30 or so friends have your phone number in their contacts list synced to facebook, all with similar names, and then sign up to instagram with that phone number.
That requires someone with a whole lot more motivation than me. I'll pass.
I signed up with my primary email address and phone number (non-VOIP, belongs to a carrier). I even have a WhatsApp account (also under Meta's purview) with this phone number.
There are many examples floating about of Threads being very paternalistic regarding what opinions are allowed. This instance, however, is just "bad automated system fails basic scenario".
OP never even had a chance to engage in thought crimes.
I can't believe that's true. I have friends who make new accounts all the time for jokes or memes. I don't think they're putting a huge amount of effort into it.
I cant come up with an explanation why it wouldnt be.
On the moral side, its clearly a no go to sell your friends stuff/data.
On the practical side, its really hard to argue that you are not aware this is happening.
Can you elaborate?
They still did not have to click that button. This isnt a get out of jail free card, intention only gets you so far. There is a reason stupidity doesnt protect against punishment. You are expected to pay attention when effecting on other people.
edit: This is a lot like getting signed up for some multilevel marketing scam by a friend. They better be really sorry and you better reevaluate the spare key you gave that stupid person with low self control. Which you should have realized earlier.
Not everyone is as savvy as us and knows of all the consequences. Facebook is exceptional at tricking people. It's their entire business model basically.
There are so many people that could have your number.
That one plumber you called that one time, who added your number to their phone could have added everyone in their contact list to WhatsApp.
Maybe you did a favour for someone and helped out their cousin and you gave the cousin your number and never talked to them again.
Maybe you had a friend you lost touch with and their number changed but they kept their address book.
You told absolutely everyone? Are you sure? Absolutely everyone and stressed to them how important this was to them?
Worse, are these replies which completely lack empathy. Such a lack of imagination as to how your number could leak. And a tone as if no one has anything else going on in their lives or more important things to do.
You do realize this is pure diffusion of responsibility? Something you can paraphrase as "It could have been anyone" is not an argument for this not to be wrong. I also believe the lack of empathy comment to be uncalled for. You not valuing your personal data doesnt give you the right to disregard mine. Especially with a friend, those dont profit off each other because of a personal disregard for the cost.
Its something worth considering, seeing as it has been two days and unsurprisingly nobody could come up with an actual justification for such behavior.
Facebook reifying “friends” into a consumer product they own and control is for sure one of the more socially alienating and consumer controlling behavior one can expect a giant monopolistic company like this would do in the age of late stage capitalism.
It wasn’t the over controlling socialist government of Ingsoc in a one party state which managed to change our thought by makinging 2+2=5, but rather a social media company Bourgeoisie in a highly corporatocratic government which fulfilled this newspeak.
I submitted a png that said "I value my privacy and will not submit a photo of myself" with black text on a white background. My account was reinstated. Found it pretty funny.
I couldn’t log in to Instagram for over a year due to a bug with my account. At first, there was no recourse. Then, they released Meta Verified, which offered customer support for a monthly subscription fee. It took about 50 emails back and forth (most some version of “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do”) before they finally fixed it for me. I deleted it shortly after.
I really hope all the developers and artists I follow don’t move to Threads. I’m not exactly jumping at the chance to use an Instagram product again.
My twitter account is banned. Not sure why as I've never used it. I can neither activate it or delete it, or contact support, as they all require a working account.
Their entire system is falling apart, but maybe this one is intentional.
How can that fly if the operate in Europe, if GDPR provides the right to be forgotten? If you won’t even be acknowledged, that blocked account may contain private information about you that you must be allowed to request deletion of.
It's outrageous they refuse to allow user defined and owned identities. This is where government oversight is needed to give sovereign identity to the account owner not Meta or any other databroker dressed up as a platform provider.
When I signed up for Twitter I had something similar happen. Banned for life by an automated system, probably because I was using a vpn, with no option to appeal
Facebook has the dating feature.
I created a profile.
Gave some up- and downvotes and comments.
After a while of doing so a pop-up with "dating needs to be a safe place" I need to verify my identity via a video call.
Are you shitting me?
I didn't even do VideoID when I created a new bank account, surely I'll trust the biggest data grabbing company on the planet and give them money worth content in form of VideoID.
My account was an Instagram account from 2015 which I used to create the Facebook account.
That was my 2nd attempt on dating.
The 1st was uninteresting.
A month later, after I had deleted my instagram account I tried again and the result is what I wrote just now.
The 1st attempt had no such obstacles.
For what it’s worth, the same thing happened to me and after about 4 or 5 rounds of take a selfie, get approved, get instantly banned again I was finally approved for good. And it has worked ever since.
Interesting. Not long ago I created an alt FB account using all fake data about myself, the only real thing was my selfie matching the username. Except I was approved instantly. I wonder what the pass/fail rate is for this system.
From what I have seen so far Threads seems to have been an incredibly rushed and premature launch, done directly to counter Twitter's missteps from the last few weeks. And the decision is proving to be the absolute correct one.
What I don't understand is why Bluesky didn't seize the opportunity first. People were literally banging on their doors begging to be let in and they continued to go "sorry we are exclusive, invites only". Now no one gives a shit.
A social network being invite-only is such an obvious non-starter that I genuinely can't imagine the conversation that went into that decision. Assuming the basic underlying tech works more often that not (and ideally some story for community moderation), there's literally nothing I want from a Twitter competitor other than having everyone on it. My interest in a Twitter competitor that is invite-only is and will always be exactly zero.
It works extremely well - it guarantees you know* someone on the social network. No empty feeds, no literally-no-one to talk at, you have someone you can ask questions about the site, etc.
Speaking from experience working on a social site with loads of signup flow experiments: the results are consistently wild. It's no competition on all the normally-valued metrics like interactions and retention.
*for some degree of "know" anyway. Better in most cases than "the news talked about this tweeter thing"
(edit: I do think they may have missed what might be the biggest boat sailing party, which was probably a mistake. But invite-only is quite reasonable.)
It guarantees you know one person on the network. And if you like it and want to invite everyone else – tough luck.
Threads solved the cold start problem by not having a personal feed at all at launch. There is only a single algorithmically curated one, prioritizing first/second/third/etc degree connections and otherwise showing content from everyone else. So the place always felt alive from day 1.
Unfortunately, they likely used AI to sock puppet and prime that pump, along with simply already having a user base.
Nothing very special about those shortcuts. Had they had a standalone system, it's not be much better than all the other attempts. This is akin to how Snoy launched the playstation.
I feel like there's some room for an invite-only period that's useful, but it needs to be short. Unless you've somehow got an amazingly complete test suite, you're likely to run into scaling problems and show stopper bugs with early users, and limiting user count temporarily allows you to see and fix some of those before you become known for your failure conditions. But you also don't want to linger in invite-only, and lose the hype. IMHO, maybe 2-6 weeks of invite only is fine.
Gmail's initial period was brilliant from a social network period before social networks. After the initial beta phase, once the bugs were worked out, it was invite only from existing Gmail users
Difference is that email doesn't have any network lock-in. If I'm the only one with a gmail.com account I'm the cool kid who can email everyone still on hotmail and yahoo to make them jealous, and now they want an invite as well. If I'm the only one with a bluesky account then I'm just...shouting into the void and no one cares.
I don't know about this. I got onto Facebook circa 2007 when it expanded from Harvard to other universities and man did I love it for a few years. Facebook really ended up being a major extension of my college experience. That was when it was just students, and it really had that new freshman undergrad social feel to it where it was all about linking up with new people you just met and seeing what they're up to and flirting and sharing pics and planning events.
I kind of feel like Google was onto something with the "circles" idea and it's not clear to me why something like that didn't catch on. I don't want to share everything with the whole world. My college friends, my professional contacts, my family - these are all social circles that I'd want to be connected to with a service like this, but in separate buckets that don't overlap (or only somewhat overlap).
So from a user's point of view, exclusive/invite-only can be really appealing. But if you're thinking from a "make as much money for the company as possible" point of view then yeah anything that limits the number of potential customers you can attract is going to hurt.
Facebook was never exactly "invite only" but when they started it was limited to certain universities, and they expanded gradually. If a social network is only going to have a few user it can still provide value if they all have something in common; better 1,000 users all in the same city/university than 10,000 users scattered across the globe. Threads doesn't have this problem since they can just do a full-court-press immediately and get 30M users in a few days. I dunno how bluesky works but if they are reasonably generous with the invites you can get your friends on it (who are interested) pretty quickly.
I've seen the belief that Google Plus failed because of the long invite-only limited access period repeated here many times - if that theory is correct, Bluesky seems to be making the exact same mistake with their launch.
It's certainly why it failed within the circles I was in. People with access in the early days didn't have enough invites to migrate existing communities - even very small ones.
A better solution is to require two invites to sign up. And then the service provider hands out double the number of invites. But now every new user has at least 2 existing contacts on the service - so their first experience is more than just saying "hi" to the only person they know there.
I think that would be impactful, but would still create barriers to entry. I'm not one to beg for invites, so I have a hard enough time casually finding one invite, let alone two. I'd imagine a good portion of invites would get stuck in purgatory waiting for a second, all while the potential user moves on to the next thing that grabs their curiosity.
What about one invite to create an account, a second to participate?
I'm not sure if this is the reason, but BlueSky doesn't appear to have a trust/safety moderation team that can operate at full scale. I mean, neither does twitter, but Jack understands that some people do want that. On the other hand, it's much easier for Meta to launch since they already have those people in place for Instagram and Facebook.
Moderation is a key feature of the MVP. If a horde of n-word spewing, cp posting spambots is the image that gets shared on newssites, it's dead in the water.
I actually don’t hate the idea but it’s the rigid sticking to it that’s the dumb part. The rate limiting clusterfuck was such a perfect opportunity to go “OK everyone here’s a hundred invites valid for the next 48 hours go wild”. Still feels like a club since you have to get an invite and creates an impetus on users to get these invites sent out ASAP.
I actually figured that this was the strategy, but now that they let that golden moment pass them by I now realise that nobody there has any idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Guess Jack just wants it to be a haven for all the worst blue checkmark behaviour of Twitter, in which case I commend him for creating a containment website.
BlueSky never had a chance, same goes for Threads. It's not some mistake in strategy, it just turns out you can't launch a copycat social network no matter how good your marketing/funding... network effects are tough.
They aren't failing due to privacy, or invite strategy, or anything else. They are failing because there's no differentiation whatsoever. It's so simple, and it's been true since forever.
The meme that Twitter is burning down is cope. The only people for whom it's burning down are extremely online liberals. And even they are not leaving Twitter. They are the only ones praying for these alternatives to succeed, or in recent HN threads asserting the downfall is assured and imminent. The actual ground truth of using Twitter if you aren't extremely online and praying on political rivals' downfall is that it basically hasn't changed much at all.
You need to differentiate, be cool, and be fun in some new way to leap past immense network effects. And probably also guarantee revenue share through a sort of decentralized network.
Bluesky, even with all the hype, is very disappointing. Days go by before I see a new post. And they invited an odd bunch of unhinged, very-online people. It would do them better to have done more “normals” there.
This is the opposite of my experience, my feeds refresh constantly. Are you just looking at just who you are following, or did you subscribe to any of the custom feeds like "What's Hot Classic" or "Gardening"?
Rushing it out the door when there is a massive Twitter (and to a lesser extent Reddit) population that is ready to jump ship now seems like the right move to me. You can always add features after, you can't ask for better timing than this.
It’s actually crazy how slow bluesky’s rollout has been. I can see why they want some level of exclusivity (so that people want to join, and when they join can immediately hook up with their friend who invited them), but they really need to open the faucet a bit.
Surprise! 30 million people wanted to join BlueSky because they wanted a twitter alternative that wasn't filled with hate fill toxic weirdo's. Now Meta's got em.
4D chess move there guys.
I feel the same way. I read one thread where someone was praising the app’s “refined” design. My first thought was, “What are they talking about. The UX is refined because there’s literally nothing here”. It’s just one feature, the MVP, posts/replies.
It would not surprise me if two weeks ago they were not planning on this release and t was only the recent drama that influenced them to release.
We'll never know if Elon would have shot himself more in the foot though without a clear competitive threat. Maybe some more time would have paid off? Though I agree that rate limiting + need to be signed in catastrophe over July 4 weekend seemed to be the sweet spot.
He can afford to sue himself, and even hire two very expensive law firms to represent both sides. He can even drag this case for decades, appealing court decisions and requesting expensive discovery, maybe even take it to supreme court.
Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder) worked at Twitter in the early days and he said that Jack was super smart and hard working which I doubt with all respect to the Twitter. He grandiosely failed at managing Vine which was supposed to be TikTok before TikTok. Vine could've been bigger money making machine that Twitter is or was. Also If I was Twitter CEO, I would've acquired popular blog platform Medium which was founded by Twitter co-founder and then I would build massive ad-network (Twitter, Vine and Medium) which could stand up against Facebook's and Google's ad business at least in the eyes of advertisers if not investors.
Also Zuckerberg wanted to acquire Twitter in the 2008 for $500m because in his paranoid head, he was scared that perhaps Twitter could overtake Facebook. Let me be clear, Zuckerberg is cutthroat competitor that doesn't care about anything except success. And looking at the Zuckerberg's track-record he won't let go this massive opportunity which is basically to kill off Twitter with Threads without much effort because Twitter is and was imploding for a very long time.
One side-note about Kevin Systrom; he said that back in the day when he co-founded Instagram, he didn't hear and know about AWS. So I must come to the conclusion in this ad-hoc way that not all successful founders know what they are doing and yea there is a lot of luck involved. And btw he is a Stanford graduate?! What is Stanford teaching these "kids"?
2) Zero downtime on a day 1 launch at the scale is a very impressive technical feat. If it had been rushed or released prematurely, this level of app stability would not have been the case. If I had to guess, this would be the reason why Bluesky hasn't been able to release to the general public
In terms of the app being a foundation that will be built on and cannibalize Twitter, I'm very bullish on the future for Threads!
I finally got an invite code to Bluesky the other day.
There is absolutely no content. Not as in “blank page nothing here” type of no content, I mean as in the “open the fridge, look around, and decide there’s nothing to eat” type of no content.
Meanwhile, Threads is content rich and there’s already people I know posting cool stuff to see and interact with.
The result, is that I don’t give a fuck about Bluesky, and I’m not going to bother spreading invite codes.
If I get at least 20 upvotes on this comment though maybe I’ll consider it since it means the interest is there.
Why has everyone on here been comparing Threads to Twitter when threads.com literally says its a Slack alternative for makers? The product has absolutely nothing to do with a Twitter style social network.
Edit: lol so FAANG just steals any and all actively used product names now. Got it.
Not sure how A C, D are relevant, trademarks pertain only to a specific category. Meta Threads was trademarked for luggage and backpacks. It'll be interesting to see if threads.com has a trademark.
One Google Play Store, Threads the chat app has "not affiliated with Threads by Instagram" in their listing. I wonder if they are getting lots of downloads by confused people.
Mark zuckerberg has literally built a monopoly of social media, lmao. At this point, since they've acquired such a large amount of users (2 billion), they can release anything and people will use it.
Meta will nuke your Instagram account for basically anything, including for no reason at all.
I have like 50 followers, 10 photos, and check my IG once every week or two - haven't posted anything in months.
Meta has banned me twice for unspecified policy violations (both times I had to send them a selfie and got reinstated, and there was no way to ask a human what these policies were).
I suspect they'll ban/unban me again someday, oh well, it's Meta and I don't care, I just make sure not to use them for anything essential...!
Probably on of the tools you post it too _or posted it in_ runs a web-scrapper.
And there might be a person specific id in the link you get, which other people copying the image don't get.
For example edge did for a while scrap any link you visited with it, even if you logged out of exactly this feature, not running any heuristics about weather it might a a magic link and then skipping it and AFIK also not stripping query parameters (through it did respect robots.txt I think).
Similar a lot of apps do similar, sometimes not even respecting robots.txt.
Through in any case it's still Meta being rediculous, because it's a known issue and you can't fault your user for doing perfectly normal things in a world where even one of the major browsers behaves like malicious spyware wrt. urls/web scrapping without user explicit consent.
> And there might be a person specific id in the link you get
This is how they know I'm doing it, each url seems to be custom generated for the specific view of the post from an account because they actually expire too eventually. But you know "scraping" is like sharing what? 15 image links off the walled garden a month?
Just think it's an insane amount of effort to go to for them to try to make the internet stop working like the internet.
Upsets me this is where we got to with image sharing vs the open and remix culture of pre-yahoo Tumblr.
Oh that's interesting. Occasionally I use the Firefox inspector to view an image directly. I don't have the eyes of a 20 year old anymore and Instagram doesn't have a full screen button or any other way to enlarge an image.
Maybe they're picking up on that somehow and getting ornery about it.
IG was an app before they were a website and they have never embraced the open architecture of the web, nor been entirely comfortable with the browser as a user agent.
That raises another interesting topic, the US DoJ is becoming increasingly aggressive about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act toward websites. I wonder how well IG complies with the relevant standards like WCAG. Probably not well. We have noticed that any website which implements a lot of anti-user features tends to be extra bad in terms of accessibility for the disabled. I wonder if we will at some point see a Big Tech like Meta start to come under fire from the US government because their user-hostile features are also hostile toward the disabled and/or this results in them skirting ADA compliance.
Is it possible you're using some ad/JS-blocker or DNS blacklist, and Meta's silly tools are interpreting that as proof of a headless scraping client?
So far that's the best theory for why Reddit recently plunged my 13-year account into Kafkaesque censored limbo. And then did it again after a month of seeking answers on another account.
> Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link.
>
> Garbage service.
As long as you(and others) keep using it, theres really no reason for them not to
about the same option I have not to have linkedin, "its where my career networks".
Does it have some kind of opportunity cost? it probably does. I know people that got exciting job offers that would not have happened had they not been on linkedin, so I would guess I have lost out to some. Its the price I pay. Not going on linkedin
They just want your government id. It makes their data set more valuable to advertisers. So the extort it out of you after you're partly invested in the platform. The security thing is just cover.
That is why they often demand your phone number later too. If the demanded it during signup you'd know the deal you were making and would probably back out. So they do it after you're invested so you have something to lose instead of them.
> If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.
Right, it's not like they gather location data and insist on real world names or buy data from brokers or use cookies. Facial recognition is the missing piece of in the puzzle!
> If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.
It's not like governments have databases with photo identification.
If you've uploaded photos of yourself on other services and those services have agreements among themselves to share each others' (anonymized?) data, then you can be tracked across services through, among other things, your photos.
I think they want selfies to enforce a one-account-per-person policy, to limit scraping. They already enforce phone verification, but there's plenty of ways around that (e.g. services that redirect verification SMS from hacked phones, or just buy phone-verified accounts from someone else). Facial recognition raises the bar and gives them extra confidence that two accounts are unrelated even if they have similar IPs/access patterns/whatever
For this reason I decided to give up Instagram completely -- my account was flagged for whatever reason that I cannot possibly understand, and I would rather not use the service than give them my selfie
They banned my account that I have never posted anyting with less than a month after I created it for violating community guidelines. The message told me it was final and I had no way to appeal the decision. Apparently not posting anything can be a violation of their community guidelines.
Had this too the other day. I am 100% certain that the ban is just a ploy to force you to give them more personal data. In my case it was a phone number, next up maybe a selfie.
I had the same experience. I barely use it but somewhat active mostly follow friends. Post a picture of food mainly. And one day banned/blocked for no reason other than some vague violation. Stupid selfie to unlock.
Since FB this spring deleted my account since 16 years for no reason (that they would say) I have to my surprise experienced a kind of freedom, a calm serenity. After the initial feeling of being insulted and shut out from my circle of friends and family through no fault of mine I have gradually come to realize a few things:
1. there are other, better ways to stay in contact with with people I care about than through group messages and posts (which is actually an insidious sort of indirect messaging when you think about it).
2. as users of these mega-services we are largely like puppets on a string, victims of the latest fads among governments and advertisers.
3. Meta is, and always was, an unethical service that profits off the wide dissemination of our most private information. And profiting off pure scams, for example those that target poor and naive people with promises of untold riches through crypto schemes as testified by various celebrities (that have had their pictures stolen). [0]
We are nearing the point where we can, nay should, en masse desert these manipulative megaservices like Meta, Twitter, Youtube et al. They represented a certain phase in the history of internet, and as all things, their hegemonies must come to an end. We can for example willfully trigger the algorithms that shut our accounts down, as it is just about the only statement we are left with.
For the sake of our own serene peace of mind if nothing else.
> We are nearing the point where we can, nay should, en masse desert these manipulative megaservices like Meta, Twitter, Youtube et al
You're right, but, ironically, that's why this new products exists.
CIA and NSA needs twitter and when Elon pulled the plug, they just found another provider.
That's great and all, but my kids daycare posts photos on a private Facebook channel. Oh and birthday parties come in on Facebook. And I sold stuff on Facebook marketplace that I wasn't able to sell ok craigslist.
It's just a useful ubiquitous app. You can use the features you like. I don't see what the point of taking such an absolutist stance decrying the app as evil. Im just trying to raise a few kids, go to some parties and sell some junk around the house
At whom? You, your friends and family are the ones who chose to make this the method. If most people didn't have Facebook accounts, it wouldn't be the default for these things.
Facebook is a glorified address book. The things we value the most on there are our connections, which is something we've always managed to do before the internet.
People clutching their pearls on social media need to stop.
Much as I despise Meta, I have to say that the article doesn't really say the same thing as the headline and it appears to be pure clickbait to me. Compare:
> Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile
with
> Meta explains: “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
The title seems to imply that a user deleting their Threads profile may more-or-less inadvertently delete their Instagram account. This is not supported by the quote from Meta, and there is no indication that there's any procedure to initiate deletion of the Threads profile which would then trigger the Instagram deletion. An accurate headline would be, for example, «Meta will delete your Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account». Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.
There is no threads account. There is no way to make a threads account. You sign in with ig. Threads really appears to be a subset of barebones and stripped down ig. Calling it a marriage of accounts seems misleading, it’s really just another Instagram client with rebooted follow list, that only lets you see posts from the new client.
The article title is absolutely written in a misleading and inflammatory way to sort of imply, without outright lying, that someone might run into a screen that causes them to accidentally delete their Instagram account. (I get a different title in yc and tc, not sure if tc is showing multiple headlines to different people depending on factors.)
The “The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users” line in the article is one of those staples of modern journalism where they take a couple tweets or threads now, and make them out to be prevailing sentiment. Cite your sources on who is surprised TechCrunch.
threads has always been heavily advertised with its Instagram integration. the app is called "threads, an Instagram app" and the onboarding flow itself is based on your existing insta follows. you can disagree with this strategy but it's definitely not unintuitive or unnecessary, they make it extremely clear
Since Threads is a separate app and logging in with Instagram was effectively a form of single sign on, it will be interesting to see how long this lasts.
It is unacceptable because it’s entirely intentional and avoidable, and in no way a best practice that benefits the users but instead the platform.
For the non technical - It’s interesting that a new profile can be generated from an Instagram account but all those fields are intentionally not being made to be removed.
> Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.
I think you're reading too much into it. "Shitty user-hostile behaviour" would be "Muahahahaha, if anyone ever wants to get rid of their Threads account they must also *delete their Instagram account*, hahahaha, the world is MINE! MINE, I TELL YOU!" <fx: thunder crash, up grams dramatic music>
Is that scenario more or less likely than "fuck it, just use the Insta signup server for auth, we need to ship something *today*" "yeah okay, that'll take me ten minutes"?
I don't know. I think that users being able to harmlessly deactivate their Threads account but not delete their profile is evidence against that hypothesis. Surely the ability to delete something is one of the most basic features? All the more so if Threads just depends on Instagram for auth.
My bet is that the decision to not allow the user to delete only their Threads profile has been fully intentional. The last thing Meta wants is for the fleeting users who quickly jumped on the latest Threads fad to eventually delete their profile once they become bored. That would be embarrassing to Threads and reduce its sticking power if it were a common enough phenomenon. Much better for them to keep the users' content hostage under their desire to keep their Instagram account.
Its absolutely this and I am shocked at the amount of people coming to the defense of Meta here, like, its not users' jobs to figure that a new app is actually the old app but in a different skin, and merely saying "an Instagram app" wasn't clear enough in obviating it was the same social media account. That's on Meta, not on users.
Those aren't the same propositions (I'm not sure they even are propositions?) so there is no such logical relationship.
"Meta will nuke your account" and "you nuke your account" is different. It might not even be possible to perform one of these (nuking your thread profile).
Your Instagram account is deleted (the state not the action) iff your thread profile is deleted.
Your thread profile is deleted iff your Instagram is deleted.
Those are the propositions that are logically equivalent.
One says that if your intent is to delete your Threads profile the only way to do so is to delete your Instagram account. The second implies (unsupported) that there's a way to delete your Threads profile that a user might not understand will also delete your Instagram account.
The distinction is around intent. The parent's phrasing makes it seem as if its done for technical reasons (e.g. your threads profile and Instagram profile are actually the same thing) while the headline makes it seem like a business choice.
Read them back carefully - they're two different sides of a coin. One is talking about deleting your Threads account, the other is about deleting your Instagram account.
its clear Meta are trying quite hard to piggyback Threads off the more palatable brand of Instagram rather than Facebook. However ultimately it's all still the same company, the same data mining and ad/influencing platform.
It's an interesting strategy, the app on the Apple App Store is published by "Instagram Inc" rather than Meta, prominently named as "Threads, an Instagram App". They could have launched it as a completely separate brand, but that would have required marketing such as "the new app from Meta", and everyone more closely associates Meta with Facebook.
It's quite surprising they never launched a microblogging network before, but I suppose they have never really launched a new network, only ever acquired them... does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
Well this is an alternative to Twitter, a company which lied about needing phone numbers for 2FA and then used them for targeted ads.
> does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
It shows they are trying to capitalize on Twitter’s dumpster fire, and for the first time there is a mainstream competitor. Sorry Mastodon. Every time Twitter bugs out, people will go to Threads. Some may never go back to Twitter.
"To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts – all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately."
No one is really jumping from Twitter, we saw last week during the rate limit debacle that everyone who was shouting loudly about how great Bluesky was are all still addicted to Twitter.
Please report back in a week how many of them are posting more on Threads than Twitter. I saw something similar with signups, but content, not so much, not yet at least.
I thought the quotes on the BBC article were quite revealing:
> Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform "friendly... will ultimately be the key to its success".
> But Mr Musk responded: "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
>>If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
Toxicity is Twitter's moat.
Its like people going to watch UFC fight, or boxing or something like that. Niceties aren't addictive. You need controversies, trolling and fighting all over to attract people.
That's why people go to Twitter. Not to post Birthday and Vacation pictures.
Is that really true, though? All of the social media today was absolutely packed with all the stuff that everybody now says is absolutely toxic during its rapid growth phase. And users today often talk about how much better it was 10 years ago when it was still the wild west.
> If Threads is a fractionally less toxic version of Twitter, it’ll do quite well.
It will eventually be equally as toxic. Twitter started in a calm setting until the ads, politics, outrage filled it up. Threads will have ads soon and will apply the same Instagram algorithms it had before to promote verified outrage.
Trump is also on both Twitter and Threads. As long as he and other Instagram users are on Threads, then the outrage town hall will continue and will be no better than Twitter.
> Trump is also on both Twitter and Threads. As long as he and other Instagram users are on Threads, then the outrage town hall will continue and will be no better than Twitter.
I don't know, I'm in Europe, I follow zero explicitly political people yet US politics dominates my Twitter feed. I don't get that on Instagram which is all I need to make the service more enjoyable and to feel less toxic than Twitter. The outrage town hall will of course continue on Threads, but hopefully with only those who are activley seeking it.
> What will people talk about if Instagram is friendly
Anything that's not the current American culture wars? The same things most people talk about in their lives when not throthing at the mouth on Twitter. (i.e. comedy, sports, tech, food, animals, jobs, cars, etc.)
And, of course, culture wars will still be discussed, but it doesn't need promoting to those not interested in arguing such things on social media.
Can you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we eventually have to ban such accounts.
I've banned some of the other accounts who were posting flamebait stuff in this thread, because they didn't have much history and some look like serial trolls. I don't want to ban your account because it's been around for a while, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
Stating facts and citing sources isn't "posting flamewar comments" -- the only "flamewar" was the baseless trolling nonsense posted in the first place, so if you could actually bother to note context rather than jumping to making ridiculous threats, I'd be grateful.
"Another anonymous coward registering a throwaway to make baseless claims" isn't "stating facts and citing sources". It's just garden-variety internet attack/flamewar (ditto for "you have mock outrage", "projecting much?", "keep up the baseless drivel and assumption", and so on).
That sort of thing is not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. You can state facts and cite sources while remaining thoughtful and respectful, so please do that instead.
Edit: We've had to ask you about this more than once before:
No anger or "jumping" (projecting much?), no misinformation - and nor a "sir" - but keep up the baseless drivel and assumption, toxic single-comment throwaway...
There's going to be ActivityPub federation. You'll be able to have it your way, especially without the forced recommended posts in the feed, as soon as it launches.
AP federation just means you can spam your posts outside the Threads walled garden, eventually. It doesn't guarantee anything about how the native client will choose to show posts.
Have you seen Threads and Bluesky? Honestly the algorithm content they feed you makes Twitter look outstanding. Insane how poor it is, Bluesky has an excuse because they're starting from zero but IG has a decade of data on my account and its awful.
I still can't believe it's app-only, that there's no desktop version. I refuse to wall off parts of the internet into silos that I have to enter through downloadable portals.
I assume they wanted to ship ASAP and didn’t want to build something on every platform at once. They’re capitalizing on Twitter’s dumpster fire, what’s important is getting a product out there that 1) replicates basic Twitter functionality and 2) millions of people can easily access.
All other platforms allow users to block ads and other malware on its platform. iOS is the only one that is actively anti-hacker. That's the difference.
I'm using "hacker" to refer to its original, broader meaning as a term, not the meaning pop media uses. Similar to the way how this site "Hacker News" is for all kinds of "hackers" in general, not just infosec crackers.
It seems like it’s going to eventually have activitypub / mastodon support? I’m hoping I can just follow everyone from Threads in my existing mastodon app. (Or from the webui of the instance I use)
Lots of instances are anti-meta integration. But imo the protocol is open specifically for this kinda thing. I don’t have to use Facebook’s garbage, but I can still get content from people who do.
It will only have activitypub/mastodon till it is the number 1 player...
At that point, suddenly the activitypub feeds will start mysteriously getting unreliable/ratelimited and eventually support will be dropped and it'll be back to a silo.
You only build the walls high after you have captured everyone...
This is an intentional strategy to work around ad-blocking and other data harvesting practices. Just take a look at the privacy information screen in the iOS App Store for example.
It shows a blank page on Firefox, though displays as it should on Edge/Chrome. I guess they simply haven't considered deploying for non-Chromium engines yet.
internet applications which have no web app have been a thing for much longer than web apps have been a thing, what a weird thing to take a stand against.
If you can deactivate your account, I don't see what the problem is - they're the same login after all so I don't see why it would be surprising that you can't delete the login to one without deleting the other.
The purpose of deleting an account (versus deactivating) is to remove your records with that company so what would the purpose of deleting just a Threads account be?
>The purpose of deleting an account (versus deactivating) is to remove your records with that company so what would the purpose of deleting just a Threads account be?
I mean, you can't delete your account on Google Sheets but leave Google Docs intact.
So it really depends on whether you think you have a separate Threads account, or just an Instagram account that Threads uses. It seems like the latter is the case though.
it's currently possible to have an instagram account without a threads account, or at least without any threads content or presence, so it is current possible to go back to that state after creating the latter
So, if the accounts are linked closely to each other, and an Instagram account is a necessity for a Threads "account", are those really "signups" or more like... logins into another view of the same service? These numbers seem overblown.
By that logic, when you create an account for some website through your Gmail you're not creating an account.
Threads still takes you through the expected signup loop of adding bio/description, finding follows and what not. It's just missing an email verification because it goes through IG.
It is, they make it super easy to appropriate that into threads and will no doubt do even more over time up to and including, I suspect, creating threads accounts for all Insta users and promoting threads content to Insta users and vice versa.
Yeah like Zuck said your Instagram followers are already there - so the question is: if you gain a follower on threads, is it also a new follower on Instagram?
AFAIK, no. Your Instagram followers also aren't already there, FWIW: when you first log in it asks if you want to follow some or all of the same people you follow on Instagram; if you follow someone who isn't on Threads yet it becomes a "Pending" follow and will automatically follow them once they join. I am pretty sure the follow lists are then disjoint.
(There actually seems to be a bug in this whole scheme btw wherein there is a window during the onboarding where your account is Private and if people follow you during that moment they become Requested follows you have to Confirm even if your account is immediately public and is swarmed with hundred of followers. I thankfully noticed and dug out this stragglers.)
The users and accounts are definitely otherwise the same, though: you can't even AFAIK sign up in the Threads app... you can only log in using an existing Instagram account that is already logged in on that same device, which seems to just use shared keychain access to the login tokens from the other app. I had an old version of Instagram installed and realized I couldn't even log in to Threads until I upgraded it.
As I mentioned elsewhere, does the conversation "Okay it's just using the Insta login service just now but I'll have its own one ready next week" "nah fuckit, just ship it, it's fine like that" sound likely or indeed familiar to you?
That's exactly what I thought. Yes, the release was rushed, so they haven't gotten to implementing all the features yet. If it stays around long enough for them to open it up to Europe they will have to support the RTBF.
OK, I'm just old and don't understand the draw of walled-garden social media, but why do people need different walled gardens for (micro)blogs, pictures, and video?
Or, why doesn't Meta make the Facebook platform better at doing the things that Instagram and now Threads do, instead of creating separate platforms for each? If the goal is to get people to sign up and connect with each other, doesn't network theory tell us that one platform with 100% of the users is more valuable than two networks each with 75% of the users and a 50% overlap?
As a user, if you know a bunch of people on one platform, why not just post your text thoughts, pictures, and videos, all to the same place?
OK, maybe your goal is to get as many total people following you as possible, and there are some people on platform A who aren't on platform B, and vice-versa, so you're on both. But why post half your stuff to A and half to B, rather than posting everything to both?
I’m like you, and we are wrong because what matters is the default experience.
Not the three clicks in experience, or the I changed a bunch of settings experience. Each platforms identity, the people it draws, the social norms, it’s purpose; is derived from its default experience.
Each identity creates a brand, and the brand is the meme communicated between people. What’s hip and in is a function of brand awareness.
> why do people need different walled gardens for (micro)blogs, pictures, and video
10 years ago, Facebook was where young people would post PG-rated pics (family members in the network). IG would be where they'd post themselves acting stupid. 20 years ago, they'd have used Facebook for this, because it was restricted to university students, no real risk of leakage to the outside world.
I’d say originally Instagram was a mobile camera app when fzz as rebook had a horrendous mobile experience.
“It just worked” and it was stripped down and simple. Take a photo, post it.
Now Instagram is feature bloated, so it’s time to launch a primitive stripped down platform again to see what direction this one grows in, instead of trying to redesign the old one. It’s a soft reboot.
Isn't that what groups are for? Facebook has groups, right?
You and your mates create a private group for pics of each other acting stupid, and that's where you post them. How is the leakage risk different from using a different walled garden?
I get the feeling that this is a skunkworks project for Meta. The fact that it's completely blocked in the European Union suggests that either they're doing something really bad (worse than Facebook), or they don't have the resources allocated to this project for their lawyers to greenlight it. And it just being a product built on top of the Instagram database would also fit in with that idea.
it seem like the Irish Authority isn't happy at all with the way the data is "commingled" with Instagram.
Could the fact that deleting the Threads account will also remove the Instagram one be connected to having this Threads thingy appear as a part/feature of Instagram instead of a self-standing platform?
This looks like it’s purely about gaming signup metrics for Threads. Make it easy to try, create a huge disincentive to cancel, and suddenly you have a wildly successful, “sticky” app.
Next step "due to incredibly good reception, we are auto-creating a Thread account for anyone signed up in any of our other platforms - saving our users billions of minutes!".
Google+ was a product trying to break into a market where the market didn't really need another product. Threads is obviously looking to take up the mantle for where Twitter is dying, and people are actively looking for a Twitter replacement. So comparing Threads to G+ is just not a good comparison.
I read a horror story on Slashdot about a user losing their Gmail account because of some issue on Google+ and that was it for me. I stayed away. My email account was too precious to risk.
my OpenAI API account got nuked due to a missing organization error when I switched clients one night. I just got an email back from their support... took them 2 months. For reference, ChatGPT API has been out for only 3 months.
I'm saying that FB wouldn't have needed to resort to this lousy strategy if that "alignment" that you mention would have given them enough numbers all by itself.
As such, adding a dying social-media activity ("short" texting) to a fading social-media property (IG) is also less than ideal for Meta the company.
Threads isn't allowing porn or NSFW content so it's pretty much dead on arrival for many communities. Even just Ukraine war news is in many cases too violent for Meta.
The over moderation by modern platforms makes the Internet pretty worthless. There's frank discussions I simply can't have on them because the topic is too sensitive and invites trolls from all sides to abuse the content moderation system.
It has the same rules as Instagram, so that isn't a surprise. Such content can always be somewhere else on the Fediverse, and Threads itself will start supporting it soon.
A family member of mine had 4000+ posts of their art on their instagram, with quite a few followers, and one day the account just got nuked. That's it, not even a message beyond "broke policies".
Ignore that dude. This "you're not paying for it" bullshit needs to end. Yes, we are paying for it. We are paying with our attention and our sharecropping labor. We give them a mind to infect and they sell that to advertisers. We give them our content and they use that to attract other minds to sell to advertisers. Any suggestion that those aren't a valuable payments shows a complete lack of understanding of the last 20 years of online "progress" and also just makes them look foolish.
I recently created an Instagram account for a project I’m involved in. Username has the word “climate” in it. I was insta-limited. They tell me I can appeal but that link errors out. Ironically, my Twitter equivalent wasn’t.
I have no idea what to think or suggest, but I say ugh to Big Social.
Completely tangential to the article itself, TechCrunch's privacy controls are also extremely user hostile.
First it prompts you with the usual consent banner but of course doesn't provide a button to refuse all unless you click through to a second screen (this is in violation of the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines btw, the "reject all" button needs to be front and center and must be given as much weight as an "accept all" button if present).
Then it shows me the article but the article embeds something (presumably a tweet or a Facebook post or something else) and tells me "To view this this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Click here to do so.". So instead of letting me decide in place that I want to agree to that one embed or even all embeds from the same source, I have to go somewhere else. And I don't even know what I'm missing out on and of course there's no direct link to whatever is being included either.
Finally if I click the link it takes me to a page with a big toggle switch that asks me to agree to all social advertising partners. Not just social networks either, most of these are just advertising and analytics. And I can't pick and choose either, I have to give a blanket consent without being informed of the details and purposes, which, again, blatantly violates the GDPR and ePrivacy guidelines.
I'm not pointing out that these are in violation because I think US companies should be beholden to EU law. I'm pointing this out because it demonstrates how blatantly user hostile this is.
I feel like the HN title here is misleading. You can’t delete your Threads profile, you can only delete your Instagram account and your Threads sub-account will follow.
Also this is quite clearly stated inside the Threads app: “Some settings, such as deleting your account, apply to both Threads and Instagram and can be managed on Instagram”.
Deactivating your Threads account, on the other hand, will not affect your Instagram account in any way, this warning is there in the corresponding Settings section as well.
"To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts – all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately."
It's also impossible to deactivate your Instagram account. I tried the other day, and they immediately sent me an email saying my account had been "reactivated at my request". Slimy, unethical company. And this is a widely known issue for months or years.
Might take quite a while. Bluesky is currently only at 266k registered users and there were already some scaling issues when Twitter introduced the rate limits. Although I think they now have improved the way that the service can be scaled up based on demand.
I am facing an inverse of this situation. I have long deleted Instagram account, and when I try to give Threads a try, it told me to "Login via Instagram". Sure, I could create another account for Instagram and Threads, but given that I cannot reuse my username as per Meta's policy, I'm not willing to give it a try until I can come to terms that I won't be able to use my original username and move on
You're still giving users and money to Meta, which is probably gonna try use threads to do an EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) on the Fediverse (Group of server software like Mastodon and Lemmy which are able to talk between each other, mastodon is probably the better twitter alternative, just try not to join the biggest instances and join a smaller one, experience is better)
True, I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, I just wanted to see what it was like. I used one of the apple hide-my-emails just in case I didn't want anything to do anything with it. From what I can see, threads doesn't use hashtags, which is a little confusing.
I did give mastodon a go, but I found it confusing, when I make account is that for that specific instance? If I choose one instance, can I see things from a different instance?
> when I make account is that for that specific instance? If I choose one instance, can I see things from a different instance?
>> When you first create your account, you choose a server — similar to how you choose to open an email account on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or wherever — which generates your profile’s address. So, for example, if you sign up for Mastodon via the climate justice server, then your address will be @[your username]@climatejustice.social. But no matter which server you sign up with, you will be able to communicate with users from any other server, just like how Gmail users email Hotmail users and vice versa. However, some servers might have blocked other servers (perhaps if it’s an unsavory group), which would mean you can’t communicate with anyone from the blocked server.
EEE is not really relevant here, they're not "embracing" fediverse at all. it's a completely separate app. they just vaguely claimed they would in the future.
Microsoft is the only company that i know of with a true EEE approach eg with Java
Not to the EU, or Australian privacy laws either I suspect. You need to be able to request your data be removed entirely.
From a practical sense it isn't equivelant either, because if I want to reduce my risk of being affected by a Threads data breach, totally valid reason to delete an account you don't use, then my data would need to be removed entirely.
Didn't facebook get away with doing that exact thing with whatsapp? They promised not to combine the phone number data with their other data and did exactly that. Maybe they got a slap on the wrist fine.
Yeah, it'd be good if the governments that had issues with it changed their position to require divestment of WhatsApp after facebook pulled that shit.
Pity that didn't happen, so yeah... they got away with it. :(
Meta nuked my wife's private instagram account for no reason. It had a bunch of photos, a bunch of friends, and a bunch of direct messages. How on earth did this even register, I have no idea. We appealed and they graciously let her back in.
They obviously piggy-backed excessively off of Instagram and the limitations are very annoying (at least for now).
I wonder how much of the decision to link Threads so tightly with Instagram was for technical reasons and speed to launch. Because I could also see them wanting to use their Instagram user base to seed the new app, as opposed to their older and probably more conservative Facebook user base.
While all of that is true, the real reason is that Threads was actually an instagram feature several years ago that they previously killed off. They were able to bring it back quickly and make some changes to capitalize on twitter's meltdown.
Not everyone is okay with it but the only way past it is regulating the tech sector and HN specifically is VERY against that, Republicans are against regulation that doesn't constrain the freedoms of people who aren't acceptable to religious fundamentalists, and Democrats seem to only care about preventing a progressive party from ever existing.
Unable to create a new IG account for my business. Keeps telling me my IP is suspicious. There is no way to reach a human and complain. It's absolutely useless!
I wonder though why did they use IG platform and not FB platform? Has FB platform grown so bad that it can't be used for implementing new things anymore?
FB and meta are both tarnished names. I’ve had non techies tell me that they are trying this “new twitter app from instagram” vs something made by meta.
Yeah definitely because FB brand is trashed. Instagram still has decent branding and many people don't even realize it's the same company.
I also imagine their accounts infrastructure is more app-driven on Instagram and was easier to integrate into a new platform without inheriting ~20 years (wow!) of tech debt from FB.
Arguably, Mastodon is also problematic from a GDPR perspective as ActivityPub doesn't offer a way to control data once it has left the instance (which is the entire point of federation). But something tells me Meta didn't have to hold off on publishing Threads in the EU because it uses ActivityPub. And this account merging may indeed also be in violation.
> ActivityPub doesn't offer a way to control data once it has left the instance
Nothing offers a way to control data once you post it publicly though? You could host a public mastodon with federation off and the amount of data exposed is not really going to be different than if you federate.
Oh no, I can't delete my account with one day of posting history. So what? And you can only use your Instagram username anyway, so it's not like you can say you accidentally picked an embarrassing name and want to delete it.
Fuck Meta, Threads, Instagram and Facebook.
I had to get this off my chest.
Facebook especially is a content propagation platform for right wing ideology, almost as much as TikTok.
At least if you're in Germany.
The amount of racist, black people hating, pro AfD propaganda, directly or indirectly is absurd.
And all reports of those get rejected.
There are Facebook groups, public, with post after post of foreigner and ethnic hate. Meta does absolutely nothing. In fact, it even suggests me more of content like it.
Instagram has hardcore porn, when reported, the report is rejected.
The while company needs to be sued into bankruptcy.
