Threads tweaks its algorithm to focus on people you follow

You’ll start seeing less content from people you don’t follow — and more from the people you do.

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By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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Meta is making a big change to Threads to show you more things from people you follow.

“We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today,” Threads boss Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday.

The change could make the For You feed include more accounts you actually care about, but we’ll have to wait and see if the update addresses the problem of the feed surfacing posts that are very old and no longer timely. You still can’t leave Threads in the Following feed, though.

The change also means that creators should expect to see “unconnected reach” to go down, but “connected reach” to go up, Mosseri says.

This is another significant change to Threads since a lot of people started flocking to Bluesky, which lets people default to seeing their Following feed when they open the app and offers lots of customizability, including custom feeds. Threads just yesterday rolled out its own take on custom feeds less than a week after it started testing them.

Bluesky just crossed 21 million users; it was at 15 million users as of November 13th. Threads is still much larger than Bluesky, though, and it got 15 million signups just in November as of last week.