Meta Just Showed How Your Stream Feed Actually Works
We all know that our digital lives are driven by algorithms, but rarely do we get to look behind the scenes and see how that content actually ends up in our feeds.
Luckily for us, Meta has an explanation of how your Threads feed actually works . Spoiler alert: it requires tracking you and everyone else in the meta apps to better understand whether you’ll actually engage with that 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 bring content to the top that it thinks you’ll like.
Meta explains that this AI program starts by collecting some public content posted to Threads, in addition to all the content posted by accounts you actually follow. Once it collects this content, it analyzes it, identifying trends based on the content you’ve interacted with in the past. Finally, the system ranks this content by placing the messages it thinks you’re most likely to interact with first.
That’s it, at least according to Meta. Of course, this seems obvious, so it’s much more interesting to know how Meta’s AI actually delivers content. The company dives a little deeper into the mechanics of artificial intelligence and how it makes predictions for your feed:
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Whether you like the publication or not . The AI takes into account how many posts you’ve seen in your feed, how many you’ve liked, and how many times you’ve liked a particular account’s posts.
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How likely are you to follow this account ? To predict this likelihood, Meta’s AI looks at how many posts you’ve seen in your feed, when you were last active in topics, what accounts you’ve recently followed, whether or not the post is predicted to violate Meta’s Community Guidelines. as well as how many times you have viewed this Instagram account.
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How likely are you to scroll past a post ? To figure out whether you’re more likely to read a post or just scroll past it, the AI looks at how long you spent viewing a post, as well as how many times you liked an account’s post. and how many times the post was viewed by other users. (That’s right: it’s not just about you .)
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How likely are you to view replies to a message ? The AI wants to guess whether you will view replies to a given message by checking how many times other users have viewed replies to the post, how many times you have replied. I’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 you are to visit the profile of the account that posted the post : The AI determines this by checking how many times the poster’s profile has been visited, the click-through rate of the profile on the account, and whether the post was predicted to be disruptive by the community. Recommendations: How many times have you viewed an Instagram account and how many times have people viewed the account’s profile.
This way, you are always followed not only on Threads, but also on Instagram – not only by you, but by all Threads and Instagram users. The AI uses all this data to predict how you will behave in the streams and, depending on your actual activity, the cycle begins again.
How to customize the topic feed
At the end of the day, your channel is what you make of it. Meta wants you to engage more with Threads, so it will try to provide you with the content it thinks you’ll interact with the most. If you’re struggling to demonstrate what types of posts you actually want to see, the AI will start to correct that. The meta outlines the steps you can take to make a real impact on your feed, reducing the chance of seeing posts you’re not interested in and increasing the chance of seeing content you want.
Most things here are obvious: if you don’t like an account’s messages, unfollow or mute them. If you are particularly offended by content, you can hide it or report it. However, Meta encourages you to share posts that interest you: by sharing a thread you like, you instruct the algorithm to show you more similar topics. There’s no explicit mention of a comment here: if you open the replies enough, Meta will understand that you’re interested in discussions about certain types of posts. If you enter into this conversation by commenting, so much the better. Finally, if you’re tired of seeing generic posts from every thread, you can switch your feed to only show content from accounts you actually follow. If you tap the Topics logo at the top, you can switch to Subscriptions instead of For You .