“Since our priority is to build consumer value first and foremost, there are no ads or monetization features currently on Threads,” a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed response.
The spokesperson then continued, “But only until early 2025. Then we’ll be throwing consumer value in the trash and lighting it on fire. It will be very exciting.”
They’re not even hiding the enshittification strategy. They’re practically teaching you the principles up front.
“First we trap you, then we exploit you. Duh.”
Is it enshittification if it’s shit from the start?
I guess you can always make it shittier?
I never understood the appeal of Threads anyway. Like, who leaves Xitter because it’s toxic garbage and goes to something owned by Meta, who practically invented this particular flavor of toxic garbage?
Sometimes you just grow tired of getting shot in the knee and want to be punch in the face instead
Well, this was the Facebook origin story, so anyone on Threads deserves it.
Consumer value as in number of valuable consumers we can grift later
You deserve a raise. Someone get this deadwalker a corner office!
Step 2 of the enshittification.
Dear Pikachu, of course you are surprised. Learn how to expect and evade Team Rocket first.
TIL Threads didn’t have ads
I’m more surprised to discover now that it launched without ads
The goal was to attract Twitter refugees. No ads helps sell the “greener pastures” the users were looking for.
Once those users are comfortable, Threads can do whatever it wants. They know how much it took to get Twitter users to leave Twitter.
People acting like Meta launched Threads out of the kindness of Zuck’s heart are dumb as fuck. Threads has the same goal as Facebook: to make money selling your eyeballs to advertisers and your metadata to data brokers.
Yet, some people seem to be harsher towards BlueSky than Threads. It’s just pure hate being focused for so many migrating there instead of Fediverse (which I agree would be better, but these people are not joining a social media to have to learn new tech terms so they can create an account and having to decide which instance after understanding federalization if they even do).
These people are happy when people migrate to Threads though, because better Zuckerberg than Musk, right? For some people it is always about hate and they avoid/are unable to make constructive criticism.
So did Facebook. It’s the old drug dealer gambit: first hit is on the house, after that, you gotta pay.
Still no reason to defederate, huh?
Still no reason to defederate, huh?
No, it’s not. Ads can’t federate. Threads has no control over my Mastodon feed and Lemmy can’t interact with Threads at all. Following Threads accounts from Mastodon is effectively an ad blocker.
Might be a stupid question, but can’t threads just post ads as “posts” via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?
Was just remembering how reddit introduced ads as basically promoted posts and recall facebook doing the same.
I sure fucking hope not.
Might be a stupid question, but can’t threads just post ads as “posts” via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?
Ads in Instagram are posts in the timeline from accounts you haven’t followed. Ads don’t show when you visit a profile and browse its images. So for example a post by Coca-Cola might appear in the main feed even though I never followed it but it has a little “sponsored” marker in a corner to indicate that it’s there because Coke paid for it and the ad placement algorithm thinks that I might be interested in that product. As Threads is a spin-off from Instagram, ads there will surely follow the very same model. Sure, you might be able to follow Coca-Cola’s Threads account from Mastodon and see the post promoting their drink that way but Threads just cannot place targeted ads on Mastodon because they don’t control that feed.
Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense for targeted ads for sure. Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads since I follow a lot of hashtags on mastodon and usually have a quite a nice “organic” feed compared to other social media.
Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads
Coca-Cola could have an official profile on mastodon.social and use hashtags there as well. Whether corporations use hashtags or not in their “regular” Mastodon posts has nothing to do with Threads.
Also Mastodon has user-level features to restrict unwanted content to show up in your feed ranging from hiding boosts up to blocking the entire instance:
And since Lemmy cannot interact with Threads content at all, defederating Lemmy instances from Threads makes even less sense. One of the big Lemmy instances blocks Threads but doesn’t block CSAM instances. Insane priorities their admins have.
Appreciate the thorough explanations, thanks!
The last part is fucked up, yikes…
Ads can’t federate
Never underestimate facebooks capacity to enshittify. If they want to send ads as posts they will make a way. In principle the fediverse should oppose for-profit-line-go-up fuckheads, it’s always the same bullshit.
Ads already are posts, as I wrote but the main feed algorithm is not in their hand, it’s the local feed of mastodon.
If users aren’t permitted to follow brand accounts, they’re just being driven into the hands of BlueSky. Your attitude isn’t helping at all.
How do you know that Threads won’t inject ads as posts?
How do you know that Threads won’t inject ads as posts?
Ads in Instagram are posts from accounts you don’t follow. Threads can’t make you follow promotion accounts you don’t want to follow.
Depending on where they want to sit in the scumbag chart, there’s no technical barrier stopping them from selecting threads-hosted accounts with high metrics and injecting advertisement posts under their handles.
Remember, the rule is “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
Threads is doing this. Kicking them to the curb regardless of the cost is the only solution.
Threads had more users than the entire non-Threads fediverse within a day or two. Mastodon is not the competition.
That would be A) identity fraud because it would be my favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions and B) not targeted advertising in any way.
Even if Threads posts illegally embedded extra ads: Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts. Threads cannot just magically place ads in the feed. That’s impossible.
identity fraud
I’m sure they could find some way to have the terms of service agreement include a paragraph on how a handle is the property of Meta and not a user identity.
My favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola.
Business accounts can be exempted from injected advertising.
Without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions.
Post the ad as an image attachment and put the advertising disclaimer within the image? There’s a lot of ways they can make an ad disguised as a post, and not all of them are as easy to filter out as a quick text search.
Not targeted advertising in any way.
If @OutdoorsyOdin posts content about hiking and mountain climbing, you can make a reasonable guess that the subscribers are going to be interested in that kind of activity. It’s not targeted to a specific user, but it’s good enough to serve ads targeted at specific lifestyles or hobbies.
Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts.
Exactly.
Anyways, this whole thing is to show that they could try to enshittify their fediverse integration if they really wanted to. There’s no technological barrier preventing them from sending ads through ActivityPub.
Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can’t allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.
I’m changing my vote in the Agora from “yes defederate” to "Hell fucking yes defederate.’
There aren’t any ads on Mastodon. :)
The only surprising thing is that it took this long.
I haven’t used threads, I just assumed it already had ads
Same
Pretty much the exact same thought I had upon seeing the title.
Gotta build that userbase before you raoe them
Yep.
There must be an enshitification chart where time is on one axis and DAU is on another, where it’s considered the perfect time to enshitifiy due to peak username or some shit
Imagine that someone has that job. They make and present that chart in meetings. That person exists and is why we can’t have nice things.
I’m just waiting for Bluesky to introduce ads.
Maybe in the future, but for now it looks like they already amnounced their next step to how they’ll monetize their platform.
Bluesky has revealed how it plans to start making money without necessarily having to rely on ads. The platform will remain free to use for everyone, though it’s working on a premium subscription that will provide access to profile customization tools (remember when Myspace offered that for free?) and higher quality video uploads.
remember when Myspace offered that for free?
This seems like a strange gripe. If their business model was sustainable, more of us would be reading this on myspace right now.
May all of the for-profit websites chip and shatter.
We don’t need them. We have never needed them.
Let’s take the internet back to when it was a place where people ran websites for things they cared about.
Fuck profits, fuck corporations, fuck capitalism. Solidarity across the working class.
Like basically everything, there’s balance to be struck. If sites operate purely off of donations and enthusiasm, it’s easy to turn out like kbin.social instead of myspace.
Nothing’s stopping people from running websites for things they care about right now, but you have to care an awful lot to host/support something for other people without the potential for it to at least pay for itself.
A subscription for a social media site. The 21th century is ridiculous. And the fact that Twitter (under Elon the scumbag Musk) introduced it first, and they’re presenting themselves as a Twitter alternative, makes it much worse. No thanks, I’m definitely staying on the fediverse.
Site selling your data? Riot!
Site having ads? Riot!
Site offering subscription? Riot!
…why no site?
I don’t think its the best alternative either but definitely better than ads, why should you be mad some people can customize little things in their profile? Discord does this and you don’t see many complaining about it, they usually criticize other aspects of Discord. Also, you can’t even currently do that on Mastodon I think (correct me if I’m wrong, I could be), you could easily do that on Misskeys which most instances are japanese and the biggest instances don’t accept non-Japanese residents because of past history of people forcing english when they clearly state to be Japanese-only. Also, it’s closer to Mastodon in terms of usage and looks than Twitter, and Mastodon isn’t so similar to Twitter. Easier for this guy to criticize when not suggesting what should be done instead, people obsessively hating on BlueSky doesn’t look so upset some of them are going to Threads instead which is a lot worse for the Fediverse to reach to and from, compared to BlueSky. Maybe give ideas on how to make it easier for non-tech people to be more appealed to use something they’ve never heard of (federalization), have to choose an instance (at this point most already give up) and learn how to communicate with people from other instances. So hard to make constructive criticism, right?
This comment looks like the sort of bot comments you usually would see on Reddit, unable of constructive criticism, just plainly hate on things and don’t make your case.
It’s not constructive criticism, I never claimed that it was. It’s just my personal opinion. I find paying for a social media site ridiculous. Donating to a Lemmy/Mastodon/(insert any Fediverse service) instance is absolutely fine, donating to FLOSS software projects or open data projects is totally fine, but paying a monthly fee for some random feature just feels weird to me. And the fact that Elon Musk popularized it, makes it even more ridiculous for me.
Did threads take off recently or what’s the story? I thought it was unsuccessful as xitter was already the preferred platform
I thought it was unsuccessful as xitter was already the preferred platform
It isn’t anymore, ad I expect that to accelerate. The Guardian just announced today that they will no longer use it, for example (although individual journalists may still choose to do so)
Meta auto created threads accounts for all instagram users iirc so they kinda forced thwir way into the market by pre inflating their numbers.
I was wondering that too. All I hear about is BlueSky and then suddenly this.
I see official POTUS content on Mastodon because of Threads. I’d say that’s pretty taken off
More short sighted corporate greed. It’s a great period to try and pull in Twitter users but instead let’s add ads for a short term bump in profits.
Why is it shortsighted? A service like this costs money to run, and if you won’t pay for it, someone else has to.
Maybe lets not try to pretend that it is just about the costs shall we? I bet MBAs will cower at the suggestion to put up a paywall from the beginning. Afterall, bait-and-switch is their bread-and-butter.
Subscriptions weren’t the norm when we actually paid for something and got the full product. The cost to run things didn’t suddenly become a factor just now.
Only thing that changed: greed of businesses, execs, shareholders.
we actually paid for something and got the full product
That’s generally not online platforms, though. For obvious reasons, those have ongoing operating costs
They’d have to implement ads eventually anyway. Companies do have budgets, and the money to run Threads has to come from somewhere.
Companies can and do make a loss to gain market share, they ae currently doing it with the metaverse and AI.
As twitter struggles under the spastic, they should be incentivising the move for users.
I wish more federated services had built in (optional) support for enabling ads so I didn’t have to constantly worry about them shutting down. Especially peer tube.
I kinda wish more federated services also had built in, optional support for directly paying the people hosting the service and infrastructure.
yeah that is why i chose not to donate to the instance is that my home any longer.
when they decided to keep federated with threads they decided that they didn’t need my donations.
You know that blocking threads account-wide on Mastodon 2 clicks and a confirmation?
Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. Fuck Jack Dorsey. Fuck Daniel Ek. Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck Peter Thiel. Fuck Jeff Bezos. Fuck Steven Huffman.
& all the rest.
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