Threads doesn’t need robust search yet
The app is for community and conversations. Everything else is secondary.
While announcing the expansion of keyword search, Threads CEO Adam Mosseri was asked a question about when Threads would launch chronological search.
See the initial Thread below:
A number of Threads users had questions about what substantial safety loophole would be created by chronological search. Mosseri followed up to same thread a few days later clarify his comments. See his replies below:
I think the Threads team’s current approach and rationale is sound. The search experience will only get better from here. It’s best not to create an early hole that the Threads team has to dig itself out of.
The Threads team has time to get search right and has no need to rush it due to user demands. I’ll explain.
Threads is a community app, not a Twitter replacement
If users continue to organically sort into different threads communities (think NBA threads, film threads) and follow each other, For You feed effectively becomes a real-time feed of content from the accounts and content you’ll likely engage with.
At enough community density, search might be less critical, because the For You and Following feeds will provide you with real-time posts about the topic you would be searching for anyway.
Users will always want search functionality, but the thing I keep coming back to with Threads is it should IMO feel like a fun group chat that just happens to be public. And you don’t really search in your group chats, do you?
More like “What’s Happening with you?”
From a product perspective, Threads search is a feature that is an service of the high-level goals which are
the number of connections (ie. mutual following)
the number of conversations (ie. posts with multiple replies)
growth of Threads network (ie. monthly active users).
Search is a means to those goals, not an end itself. It is a secondary use case that is being de-prioritized vs the primary use cases of community and conversation. That’s gonna frustrate a lot of people who are used to the Twitter way of text-based social media, where searching for “What’s Happening?” what’s a primary use case. And what’s happening was often spamming trends and engaging in harassment.
To wrap this up, if a half-baked chronological search experience could negatively impact Thread’s key goals (IMO)
number of connections
number of conversations
network growth
and there’s a high likelihood that it would, then chronological search shouldn’t be launched just yet. I’m sure the Threads teams has more than enough higher priorities that should be worked to impact their key goals.
Onboarding should be a higher priority for Threads
We’ll see more and more of these posts saying Threads is not as intuitive in getting started as it could be. This issue directly impacts all 3 key goals I shared earlier in this post.
Having the community guide new users is great. As an extrovert, I love it. However, I don’t think it scales long term. It will become a bottle neck to organic growth at some point when the Twitter diehards who need a replacement stop coming.
If I were on the Threads product team, I’d thinking about how we can use the features built and data accessible to create a lightweight onboarding.