We all know that algorithms run our digital lives, but we rarely get to look behind the curtain to see how content actually ends up in our feeds.
Luckily for us, Meta has it an explanation of how your Threads channel actually works. Spoiler alert: it requires following you and all other users on Meta apps to get your best guess as to whether you will actually engage with this post at the top of your feed.
How does your Threads channel work?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, your Threads feed is powered by artificial intelligence. Its goal is to put content that you think you’ll want to read at the top.
Meta explains that this AI program starts by collecting a portion of the public content posted on Threads, in addition to all the content posted by accounts you actually follow. Once the content is summarized, it analyzes it, looking for trends based on content you have interacted with in the past. Finally, the system ranks this content, ranking the posts you’re most likely to interact with first.
That’s it in a nutshell, at least according to Meta. Of course, most of this seems obvious, so it’s worth learning How Meta AI actually delivers content that is more intriguing. The company goes a little deeper into the mechanics behind AI and how it makes predictions for your channel:
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Regardless of whether you like the post: AI takes into account how many posts you’ve seen in your feed, how many posts you’ve liked, and how many times you’ve liked posts on a specific account.
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How likely are you to follow this account?: To predict this probability, Meta’s AI looks at how many posts you’ve seen in your feed, when you were last energetic in Threads, what accounts you’ve recently followed, whether the post was predicted to violate Meta’s Community Guidelines, and how many times you viewed this account on Instagram.
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Probability of scrolling past an entry: To find out whether you’re more likely to engage with a post or simply scroll past it, the AI looks at how many times you’ve viewed a post, how many times you’ve liked a post on your account, and how many times the post has been viewed by others. (That’s right: that’s not the point You.)
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How likely are you to look at replies to a post: The AI wants to guess whether you’ll be viewing replies to a given post by looking at how many times other users have viewed replies to the post, how many replies you’ve personally seen, how many times you’ve liked this account’s posts, and how long it’s been since you last used Threads.
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How likely are you to visit the profile of the account that published the post?: AI checks this by looking at how many times the author’s profile was visited, the account’s profile click rate, whether the post was predicted to violate Community Guidelines, how many times you viewed the Instagram account, and how many times people viewed the account’s profile.
In conclusion, you are Always following not only on Threads, but also on Instagram – not only you, but also all Threads and Instagram users. The AI uses all this data to predict how you will behave on Threads, and depending on your actual activity, the cycle starts again.
How to customize your thread feed
Ultimately, your channel is what you make of it. Meta I want will encourage you to engage more with threads, so I’ll try to share content that I think you’ll engage with the most. If you do your best to show what kind of posts you actually want to see, the AI will start to correct for that. Meta describes the steps you can take to actually influence your feed, reducing the risk of seeing posts you’re not interested in and increasing the chances of seeing the content you want.
Most things here are obvious: if you don’t like an account’s posts, unfollow or mute it. If content particularly offends you, you can hide or report it. However, the meta encourages you to share posts that interest you: by sharing a thread you like, you tell the algorithm to show you more like it. Commenting is not explicitly mentioned here: if you open replies enough, Meta will know that you are interested in conversations about certain types of posts. If you engage in this conversation by commenting, even better. Finally, if you’re tired of seeing generic posts from all threads, you can switch your feed to only show content from accounts you actually follow. If you tap the Threads logo at the top, you can switch to Next instead For you.
