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Suw Charman-Anderson's avatar

It's going to be wait and see on Threads. It's one thing to get people to sign up, but another to get them to stay. Obviously Meta has an advantage, but so far I haven't heard anyone singing Threads' praises as a great place to be. I'm currently a Threads refusenik, though I was a Facebook refusenik too until a friend created an Ada Lovelace Day event there and I had to sign up to manage it. I suspect I'll eventually get forced on to Threads too, but I'll resent every second of it.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

Wait, aren't we all supposed to boo and hiss about billionaire-owned social networks, and tout (toot?) Mastodon and the Fediverse nowadays? I can never keep up.

Anyway, I remember back when Twitter first started, how happy all the "influencers" were about it. How they rhapsodized about the people they'd connect with, the ease of use, the way their fan club seemed to hang on every little thing they tweeted. And how I'd get a lot of flak for not liking it, partly due to the rampant bullying and harassment - which was not consider a major issue at the time, since then it was almost all "punching down" by the most prominent influencers.

Zuckerberg is much better at a certain type of chattering-class politics than the Great Musk Satan. Maybe this is the "MySpace moment" for Twitter. But we're just going from one billionaire who doesn't seem to understand the social media business to another billionaire who knows it very well.

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