Adam Mosseri says Threads has had some issues with “low quality recommendations” over the last few weeks and should get “much better over the next few weeks”
Adam Mosseri says that Threads has had some issues with what he calls “low quality recommendations” over the last few weeks.
The VergeJay Peters
Context & Ripple Effects
Threads was built and shipped quickly as a bare-bones product, while Mosseri has described a broader ambition to make it a leading venue for public conversation. That makes feed quality a core product constraint rather than a cosmetic issue, especially for a service relying on discovery beyond a user’s existing network.
The report also foreshadows a later ranking shift toward posts from accounts users follow, which suggests Threads was still calibrating the trade-off between recommendation-driven discovery and relevance from established connections.
First-order effects
Threads users may see less relevant material until the recommendation issue is corrected; Mosseri says the feed should improve over the coming weeks.
Creators whose distribution depended on recommendations can see volatile reach while ranking inputs are adjusted.
Second-order effects
A weaker discovery feed raises the value of followed-account content and community participation as more dependable ways to reach users—a direction reflected in the later followed-content ranking rebalancing.
Product teams face a tighter quality-control burden: aggressive recommendation systems can increase exposure, but poor matches can reduce confidence in the service’s public-conversation ambition.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, Threads’ growth strategy will depend less on maximizing unconnected reach and more on tuning a hybrid feed that balances social-graph relevance with discovery.
Recommendation quality becomes a competitive differentiator for public-discussion platforms: the platform that can broaden distribution without degrading relevance is better positioned to retain both readers and creators.
The trend: Threads is part of a broader shift from launch-speed social products toward continual ranking calibration to reconcile algorithmic discovery with user trust and creator reach.
RE: Threds pushing homophonic & transphobic right wing crap into our feeds. It's a start and there's a lot of work to do to combat the increasing nonsensically hate speech on here, but the transparency is appreciated 👍
I would love a “Not interested” option to mute entire categories of posts — namely transphobia, hate speech, engagement farming and accounts that repost plagiarized content. I currently block these accounts, but that must count as an interaction because when I return to the app,…
Learn from Mastodon. Give users control over their feeds by way of usable but powerful blocking and muting controls for everything from accounts to keywords. Allow them the *option* to see the Following feed by default.
Do you still think that politics shouldn't be discussed on threads? I saw your statement about that and strongly disagree, because talking about politics is just talking about the world we live in and a trustworthy platform for those discussions is desperately needed.
I “questionable” doesn't begin to cover it. I have LOST COUNT of the number of reports I have filed just in the last week or two with comments on my threads which are indisputable bullying, hate speech, and even one or two death threats. At least 3/4 of these accounts are still…
In the just five months I had perhaps one or two “babes” follow or reply. Looking at these, it was easy to block. In the past week or two, I've had a lot more all at once. Block block block. But shouldn't the algorithm be able to tell that an account is just sex bait and supp…
I don't know if @threads is for me. I don't know what happened to this platform, but it's gotten toxic and WILDLY transphobic very, very, very fast. It feels deliberate. I just had someone in my replies saying that people like me need to be “eradicated.” Get that 4chan garbag…
It's because the current political ideology of the American far-right is “invade the spaces where regular people have normal conversations and ruin them with hate.” Twitter is dead as that place, they think this is the new place, and bad algorithms amplify ragebait. …
Well, this is a good sign. But doesn't speak well of the people who claimed it was all my fault that I was seeing a ton of absolute garbage in my timeline. https://www.theverge.com/...
Some comments are brutal. But I expected the Threads press to take a hit soon. The gush was misguided. The one thing about Threads, thus far, is that it bumped fediverse awareness a bit. — If Threads has felt different to you lately, you're not alone. - The Verge. HT @mmas…
I had to delete threads because I couldn't figure out why I was “following” those accounts. I would block one and it be replaced by serval more — Social media in 2024 is bonkers. [embedded post]
Earlier this week my Threads feed was full of extreme transphobic content that I kept blocking and it kept showing me more. I mentioned it on threads and had people yell at me how it was all my fault for not understanding how Threads works. [embedded post]
Recommendations are hard to do well. They depend a lot on the quality of the behavior data (wisdom of crowds fails with astroturf and shilling) and optimizing for the right metrics (not clicks please). It's easy to get it wrong. [embedded post]