Threads wants to be the app you can’t wait to open in the morning

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

By all measures, Meta’s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple’s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. “We do a bunch of work to get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,” Hayes explained.

Hayes, who helped launch Threads initially and was named its head in September, has been focused on clarifying the platform’s identity. In our conversation, he said the goal for Threads is to be “the place on the internet to talk about what’s going on in the world.” Practically, that means going vertical by vertical — sports, entertainment, news — and tipping both creators and consumers toward using the app more.

When it comes to competitors, Hayes is focused on more than just X. “Reddit has a ton of activity that is analogous to what happened on Twitter in the early days,” he said. “Discord has a bunch of these big group chat-style communities.” He acknowledged Twitter, now X, as “the app that pioneered the core format,” but made clear that the battle for real-time conversation is crowded.

A traffic channel for creators

There’s no direct monetization for creators on Threads right now. Hayes is pitching something different: Threads as a traffic channel to other platforms where creators actually get paid.

The clearest example is podcasts. Threads recently launched a feature that renders show and episode links from platforms like Spotify and lets users pin them to their profiles. Hayes said Threads is open to other partnerships with platforms like Substack and Patreon as well. But there’s no plan to let creators paywall content directly on Threads or to share ad revenue like YouTube.

Ads are coming, but slowly

Meanwhile, Threads is testing ads in four countries, including the US, but the load is deliberately light, Hayes told me. “We are ramping the ad load up steadily over the course of the next year,” he said, “but only doing it when we feel like there’s enough value on the consumer side of the app to justify doing that.”

Controlling the algorithm

Threads is testing a new feature called “Dear Algo” in a handful of countries. Users can ask to see more or less of a topic, share their algorithm prompt for others to use or remix, and have their personalized feed adjust to the prompt for three days. “After a heartbreaking loss of your sports team, you can be like, don’t show me NFL content for three days,” Hayes said. “But you’ll be ready on day four to come back in.”

The broader point: content understanding has gotten better thanks to LLMs. “We now don’t just know that a thing is about basketball. We know that it’s the 1998 NBA Finals, and it’s this player taking a shot for this team.” That precision is what makes this kind of algorithm steering possible. Hayes has been surprised by how specific early user requests are with prompts like, “show me more football content, but not Patrick Mahomes.”

The fediverse is on maintenance mode

Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that it’s not a top priority for the current roadmap. “It’s something that we’re supporting, it’s something that we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing that we’re talking about that’s gonna help the app break out,” he said.

“As someone who has built a zillion consumer products, it’s just really hard to keep these divergent platforms and products consistent on the same protocol over time,” he explained. “There’s always going to be the trade-offs that these companies are thinking about of how much energy do I want to pour into compatibility with this ecosystem versus iterating on this thing I’m building and seeing what’s valuable.”

Prioritizing timeliness but not news

Threads used to be mocked for how it would surface old content. Now, the app prioritizes recommending content from the last 24 hours, according to Hayes. “If something is four or five days old, even if it’s really good, we probably won’t show that.”

Unlike X, Hayes said Threads isn’t making a push to get more journalists and publishers on the app. “We just look at it like any other vertical, which is that there are certain creators who are really good at this and know a lot about it. There are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content.” He said Threads isn’t downranking news, but it’s “not one of the focus verticals right now.”