Anti-Social Media: Corporations Just Don’t Get it

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I keep trying to like Threads. I know, I know, this is a massively unpopular thing to do on the fediverse, but I tend not to do what other people want me to do until I've come to concrete decisions and ideas on my own, through my own experience. There's a lot of the internet, and on social media in-general where I think people just make snap decisions based on things other people say, without research, or experience, and I think that's bad.

But, every so often, I give my Mastodon instance a little break, a little time to cool off from my constant posting, and I switch over to Threads. And it feels refreshing at first, and then quickly devolves into me slowly losing every ounce of faith I ever had in humanity.

Don't get me wrong. You can find people who like the things that you like, or post things that you like, at least, but viewing the timeline, by and large, is cluttered, flooded, spilling over with content theft. It's LLM generated theft, it's people copy and pasting posts they didn't make in order to get quick engagement, it's people ripping stranger's videos off of Tik Tok and posting it to their own timeline on Threads to ... again, get engagement.

To me, it just makes me angrier the longer I stare at it. And that's how they get ya. That's how corporations keep you on their social ecosystem.

These things: Twitter, Threads, maybe even Bluesky--They're built to keep you engaging, no matter what kind of reaction you're having, at all costs. So the algorithm will continue showing you things that piss you off, because it keeps you logged in, because it keeps you generating stats for their shareholders. You can avoid this on Threads by interacting only with things you enjoy ... but only for so long.

And, I think, after trying to like Threads for about six or seven months, I think it's time to stop trying, and just let it be whatever it might end up being. From the looks of it, they're poised to have an exact clone of Twitter, but without Elon Musk's name attached. And, I cannot stress this enough, the way Twitter was designed and used, was never, ever, good.