Want a chronological timeline on Threads? Here's the problem with that
Most default social media feeds today are controlled by elaborate algorithms, leaving people longing for the simplicity of feeds organized chronologically. When asked about bringing a chronological feed to Threads, Meta CEO Adam Mosseri reveals that it's much more complicated than you may think.
On Friday, Mosseri replied to a Thread where a user asked about future plans to order Thread search results chronologically in the future, saying, "No, that would create a substantial safety loophole."
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To provide more background on what he meant, Mosseri followed up the Thread by explaining that by having all posts with a specific word displayed in chronological order, bad actors would be able to easily infiltrate the feed and ruin the quality of the results.
"To clarify, having a comprehensive list of *every* post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means spammers and other bad actors pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant words or tags," said Mosseri.
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The issue described by Mosseri is seen on X (formerly Twitter) when looking up a keyword or trending hashtag and organizing it by the "Latest" chronological tab, which often displays lots of unrelated or spam content that users are posting with the trending keyword to gain visibility.
To address the likely follow-up question of why Threads couldn't just take down the bad content on a chronological feed, Mosseri clarified that "there's a lot more content that people don't want to see than we can or should take down."
Although many of the posts that appear on a chronological search result of a keyword may be spam or irrelevant, they don't quite cross the line into content that can be taken down by Meta.
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For all of those reasons, Mosseri highlighted the importance of some form of ranking on Threads, but he did add that Meta is not done working on search capabilities.
The decision not to incorporate a chronological feed on Threads shows Meta's dedication to establishing Threads as a better X alternative, fixing Twitter's wrongs instead of following the exact same blueprint.