Threads

Kevin Drum points to this piece by Rebecca Jennings at Vox, lamenting how “boring” Meta’s new Threads app is. Here’s her take, as compiled by Drum:

Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their “hot take” that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world’s most boring Hinge profiles….Threads is Twitter for people who are scared of Twitter.

….Twitter is a platform that attracts a certain type of person….The best Twitter users aren’t people who are looking for sponsorship deals or mugging in front of a camera; by replicating your follower list from Instagram to Threads, you’re not necessarily seeing posts by interesting or funny people. Instead you’re seeing posts from acquaintances, brands, and influencers, and these are not the people who are going to invent the internet’s next best posting format or a new genre of humor. There is nothing revelatory or novel about what’s happening on Threads….For now it’s simply a much less interesting version of Twitter.

Jennings says Threads being boring, being tame, being a place where you just see the people you decide to see, a place that looks like “the internet roughly a decade ago.” And to all that I say, yes exactly. Thank God. What a breath of fresh air. I know the Twitter bubble is real, so some power users may not understand this, but some of us are sick of social media’s “excitement”, being a place where the loudest and most belligerent are featured, a feed of uninformative crap spewed by people that many of us never signed up to see or hear in the first place. So yeah, Threads is kind of bland and boring and half-formed. And some of us like it that way.

I’m sure Meta will figure out how to overmonetize and ruin Threads sooner rather than later. Big tech is good at almost nothing else. But lets enjoy the moment before it does.

On a related note, looking for a social media platform that will never be ruined by monetization schemes and hyperbolic power users? Try out Micro.blog! It’s a fantastic place to be, a true open-internet place where things are calm, counting your likes and comments are impossible, and you only see the people you want to see.