Originally published at: BBC gives up on Threads | Boing Boing
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I think you’ve just written the perfect tombstone for Threads.
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Obviously Threads just needs to pivot to video; reliable sources assure me that that’s the media that all the kids these days are consuming.
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It’s almost as though most people may finally be sick of toxic social media platforms solely designed to maximize engagement and advertising dollars through malevolent algorithms. Imagine that.
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Mastodon isn’t it, either.
Nor the Blue Sky thing.
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Has threads tried throwing millions of dollars at an attractive heir or heiress to make four videos for them per year? Surely that could catapult threads into the excellent discussion media it has to potential to be.
/S
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When I saw this headline my first thought was they were either deleting the TV play from their catalogue or putting it in the public domain or somehing.
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feels like a very depressingly human thing that people will chose comfortable familiarity even when shown how detrimental/toxic/dangerous/harmful that choice is. Twitter is horrible. Yeah threads is run by another rich guy but its night and day when it comes to the way musk actively promotes misinformation and hate. Kind of bummer threads couldn’t take him down completely. Really the problem is conservative (i mean reluctant to change, not right wing) agencies like news media companies, politicians, government agencies etc never have been able to ditch twitter. The only reason it’s still relevant is because those organizations that have really useful information to disseminate are still doing it there.
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Twitter is already garbage, not just the particular service but as a concept. If you want to replace it you need to do something different. Just having the exact same thing with a different out of touch billionaire tech bro behind it is not different enough. Mastodon is the way to go, philosophically, imo. I don’t use Mastodon either though, due to my aforementioned belief that the concept of a platform all about screaming brief hot takes into the void is inherently garbage.
And yes, I see the irony of this comment. At least a BB BBS reaction thread is contained, on a specific topic, and allows one to be a bit more verbose.
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“It” isn’t it either.
It is over.
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I would agree… except for the lack of an oxford comma.
It is a sacrilege that cannot be allowed to go unmentioned.
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The fediverse doesn’t need to win, it just has to keep on not failing as it has continued to do for the better part of a decade. People and organizations that like it will stay, just as with any other social media tool. I follow Pro Publica, Ars Technica, and the BBC on Mastodon. Writers like Neil Gaiman, James Gleick, and Cory Doctorow post often. William Gibson posts more rarely.
If you want to try it, then I suggest you choose a regional general-interest server-- and do read the terms and conditions-- every server sets their own. AFAIK all servers are free, as in beer, but your admin will appreciate it if you pay for a round once in a while.
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I remember when that happened - it destroyed the business of my employer’s parent company at the time (what we did at my job had nothing to do with our parent company, they bought us for some inscrutable reason).
It’s funny because I mean, TikTok anyone? It was BS when it happened but now video IS what everyone is consuming, right?
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The problem with Threads is that it shows one or two posts from the accounts you follow, then floods your feed with posts from accounts you don’t follow. There’s no way to filter it and the only way you can be sure you see all the posts from the people you follow is to visit each of their profile pages.
It’s not a surprise that the BBC isn’t seeing engagement. The app literally refuses to show posts to most of their followers.
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It’s interesting how people will talk about how Twitter was ‘it’ and now post-twitter things aren’t measuring up to be the next ‘it’. Meanwhile, if you would go on reddit and read a news article about twitter for the last few years, you’d see endless comments going “what is twitter? I would never use twitter ever”
I’m on Mastodon, and it seems like the decentralized federated model is kind of a good thing, however what makes it good also makes it bad. There’s been continuing drama about blocklists and instance moderation. for example, mastodon.art’s moderator has decided to block/defederate from instances that don’t measure up to their desire for fast and authoritative moderation. So people on that instance would be following lots of interesting people on some other instances, then one or two people on one of those instances does something a bit icky, and mastodon.art gets a complaint and goes to that instance, and when the instance with the icky person doesn’t go “we will delete them immediately!” mastodon.art goes “okay well you’re not up to our standards, we’re blocking your whole instance”. Then suddenly all sorts of legitimate people are disconnected from each other. That’s how the fediverse is intended to work; it’s the inverse of Twitter, where there’s only one moderation authority and you live/die based on what they do/don’t do. The downside is that suddenly your social network access is controlled by ordinary people who decided to run an instance and then decide to be a dick make decisions that don’t benefit you.
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The answer to that is presumably to run your own instance (possibly together with a few friends that you trust to not be dicks). This is something of a hassle with Mastodon (the software), but there are new servers in the pipeline, like Takahē, that should make it a lot more feasible.
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Inertia and some missing tooling. It’s been getting better though.
Inertia in that groups have gotten into the habit of posting to twitter. Same with ad spend to some extent.
Tooling, that many content systems can automatically post to twitter and that’s not smooth for Threads yet. This extra friction helps support the inertia to not change. Threads can fix this, and it sounds like it’s in the roadmap eventually.
Are you using the phone app or the web page?
In the app, you can select a following tab and that’s all it shows you. However, the app is very aggressive about switching you back to For you. Twitter over the years has gone back and forth how aggressive it is about switching you back to For You. Twitter is currently just as aggressive as Threads switching you.
On the web, Threads is missing this option completely. The web site is clearly inferior to the app. Another problem that impacts news and media companies more when posting. This also makes it way worse for anyone not using a phone.
In my experience, Threads has been getting slowly better every week. Slower than I wish it was happening. Twitter has been getting worse every week, at a slightly faster pace. I guess we’ll see where these trends end up with the two platforms.
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