Here's why Threads fucking sucks and Meta knows it
Another banger from Hank Green on why Threads fucking sucks. His benign attempt to get attention from his followers for his charity-oriented store during Black Friday was served to basically none of his audience. It wasn't rage bait and it included a link off the platform: the poison combination for Threads to have any interest in showing that post to people.
Then he decided to try making snarky replies to other rage bait posts and include the link to the store in those posts. Turns out, that was a much more winning strategy for him, and he got a lot more views on those posts, which drove a lot more sales at his store. That's business in 2025, babyyyy.
If I had to sum up one of Hank's complaints, and my own personal bugaboo about X/Threads, it's that one of the main points of building up an audience online is getting the ability to do something with them. Hank Green makes things that people enjoy, they follow him, and he can let that audience know about things like sales at his store or his latest drive to bring money to good causes. This is good for users who get entertainment, it's good for the social networks who earn ad revenue on the chatter, and it's good for Hank who gets to use his influence. I think platforms like YouTube do this well (as well as Mastodon and blogs, of course), and everything from Threads to X to TikTok actively fight against this. I hate it.
Of note, he remarked that Twitter was still even worse, and made a bet how long it would take him to scroll and find some white supremacist content. It was 10 posts down with someone wondering who would have the courage to make it okay to say the n-word again.
Anyway, back in 2022 I wrote that I don't think people want another Twitter, and I don't think that was totally correct, as X and Threads have done pretty well since then, but I personally am not happy with them. Threads has the most vapid shit you've ever seen, and yes, everything I see in my feed are people talking about how terrible someone or something else is with no actual insight. X at least has some people posting interesting threads (heh) about product releases and new tech, but that's nestled in between the most racist shit you've ever seen, which the platform also rewards. Mastodon and Bluesky don't make my blood boil as much as the others, but I still wish there were more people there so I felt like I was seeing a more representative slice of the world and not a thin, specific slice.