Threads vs. Twitter: The new Meta app is already leaning into addiction.

Last week, as Twitter struggled to contain the multipronged fallout from its sudden rebrand as X, its competitor from down the San Francisco Peninsula tried to twist the knife. Reporters at the Verge discovered last week that when users browse the app’s newest additions, “Threads will occasionally rehide the Following feed and bring you back to the For You feed after you open the app.” Users have to put in active effort to keep themselves out of the recommendation-happy default settings, no matter how much they may express their displeasure with this lower-grade, text-based TikTok rip-off. Threads’ centering of a For You feed doesn’t mark the first time Meta has appropriated another social app’s innovations and even branding for itself—Snapchat’s “stories” for Instagram, Twitter’s hashtags and blue checks for Facebook—but it is one of the more telling instances. Yes, last year the app’s user numbers shrank for the first time ever, but Facebook still has more than 2 billion daily active users, and Meta as a whole is doing more than OK moneywise. Adam Mosseri, Meta’s head of Instagram and Threads, wrote a Thread stating that the goal of Threads is “to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter.” On one hand, sure, that sounds pretty similar to Mastodon’s and Bluesky’s goals, and Meta has stated that it wishes to make Threads compatible with the types of decentralized networks that underlie both.