Threads – Anybody?

[NoelParticipant]

79 million lemmings as of last night. Elon Musk is having a child right about now. Zuckerberg really screwed him with this one.

Let me preface that with the fact that I don’t keep a Facebook profile and I deleted my Twitter account the day after Musk paid $44 Billion for it. It’s now worth $15 Billion. Talk about taking a bath. My online social exposure is relegated to this site, an Instagram account that I only use to see what nonsense about Jack Russel Terriers my wife is sending me, and a Liberal leaning site called DailyKos.com.

After years of refusing to join Facebook I one day took the plunge and signed up. It was great the first couple of days, reconnecting with people from my pass and all. But then I got a phone call from an ex girlfriend and she wanted to talk about how much fun we had discovering ourselves at her parents house. I told her to lose the number. Suddenly it dawned on me. For the last 35 somewhat years I’ve been doing my best to disassociate myself from these people and here I am now searching them out. I deleted the account which is a bear to do.

Someone pointed out about the terms of service for the new platform “Threads”. Before you hit the agree button they tell you pretty much that all your online info is theirs. Not that this site or any other social media site is any different. They have to eat too. But with Threads if you delete your profile you also lose your Instagram account.

Will I join? Probably not today.

[UnseenParticipant]

Never figured out what the appeal of Twitter is. Anyone want to tell me? If anything noteworthy happens there, news sources will feature it. I actually do have a Twitter account under a made up name, so maybe I’ll lose that since I think Musk may be verifying accounts but I won’t be losing sleep over that.

My attitude toward Instagram is similar. Why would I want an account there?

I do use Facebook to stay in touch with family. I can block people I don’t want to be in touch with or who become a pain in the ass, which is quite easy. You can control how they use your data, apparently, but I guess it’s difficult. I figure that they provide the service, which I use, for my data which doesn’t affect me adversely, as far as I can tell.

Joining Threads, obviously, isn’t on my agenda.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I had an FB account that I only used for atheist related stories and posts. My bio said something like “I have no interest in befriending anyone so please don’t bother”.

Turns out Christians and Muslims could not wait to become my friend so that they could proselytize to me about their imaginary gods.  As I only linked to or liked atheist feeds,  they could not wait to befriend me. Thousands of them.  Telling them to fuck off only encouraged them more 🙂 That message was about the only thing I ever posted.

Twitter or the Zuck’s new Threadbare? No thanks.

 

[AutumnParticipant]

Most of the allure of these sites ends up being that they carry momentum and they require no fee to use (though Twitter seems to be shifting fast on that front). Twitter had novelty when it emerged in the space. I don’t know how many microblogging sites there were at the time, but one of them was bound to catch on, and when it did, it carried that weight of attracting celebrities, constant realtime feeds on current events, and feverish microdoses of certain neurotransmitters triggered by the flurry of activity and reactions.

But the sites aren’t as easy to monetize as they seem, and they’re even harder to competently moderate. Facebook’s monetization scheme seems to eat itself over the long run. Threads will probably have the same problem, if it ever gets traction in the first place. Number of users doesn’t mean good engagement. And Facebook’s moderation practices are trash.

Twitter was struggling before the Musk takeover and it’s difficult to imagine it’s doing much better now. The dream of a ‘free speech absolutist’ Musk crashed and burned quickly, and that’s even with granting him leeway for certain legal obligations or potential liabilities that require a certain level of moderation.

Other alternatives such as Mastodon and Bluesky don’t have the traction of Twitter or Threads in terms of user count, but who knows how well they are doing when it comes to active users or engagement.

At the end of the day, social media sites all fit an awkward space that borders on paradoxical unless we rethink what social media actually is. I kind of hope more and more of the social media giants stumble because at this point it feels like they are holding online social interaction hostage rather than facilitating it. But it’s not like there is an actual simple solution as things stand right now. Even if there were, Threads isn’t it.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Autumn wrote:

At the end of the day, social media sites all fit an awkward space that borders on paradoxical unless we rethink what social media actually is.

Why do you think it’s paradoxical?  Because it sinks under the weight of numbers?  Reddit looks like it’s in the process of folding up as we speak.

[AutumnParticipant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Autumn wrote:

At the end of the day, social media sites all fit an awkward space that borders on paradoxical unless we rethink what social media actually is.

Why do you think it’s paradoxical? Because it sinks under the weight of numbers? Reddit looks like it’s in the process of folding up as we speak.

In short, they need the size to remain viable with their current models, but size makes them too difficult to manage without spending more on resources. Which means a need for greater monetization or cutting corners, both of which are a turn off to user engagement. Something needs to change so they can scale better, either better monetization schemes, lower financial needs, or lower resource requirements. But in our current paradigm, it’s probably difficult for any of those things to budge a great deal.

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