Darren, 43, was sitting on the 149 bus scrolling through Instagram when something unusual caught his eye. There, among the aspirational patisserie and retro football reels, was a little portal into Threads, the social media network launched by Instagram’s parent company Meta in July 2023.
Darren had joined Threads when it launched, more in dismay at what Elon Musk had done to Twitter (now X) than any great faith in Mark Zuckerberg’s rival vision. He hadn’t used it much since. He was using Instagram less, truth be told. But when he did, he’d noticed the teaser adverts for Threads appearing with increasing frequency. And there was something about this particular post that demanded a response.
“It was just some dude I’d never heard of saying: ‘Name a better Nineties album[sic] than Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, I’ll wait’,” says Darren.
“I know it was dumb. I know this person was basically trolling. ‘I’ll wait’ is such a huge red flag. But… I just couldn’t let that stand.”
Before he knew precisely what he was doing, Darren had entered the portal and engaged. “I can’t believe I wasted precious minutes of my life on that shit,” he says.
Darren has asked for his name to be changed. But he is sharing his story in the hope that other Londoners do not make the same mistake. For there are thousands, perhaps millions, who have been drawn into similarly inane exchanges on Threads — which seems to exist solely in order to lure innocent users into banal disagreements about stuff that doesn’t matter.
The engagement business
One friend glumly reports that he got into an argument with a stranger about whether 12pm means noon or midnight. Another wasted precious minutes arguing about vinegar. Hell, I am not immune myself. Darren, c’est moi. Engagement bait, as it is known, has a way of finding all of our weak points. Mine just happen to be bad opinions about music.
We’re being drawn into wasting precious minutes arguing about baked beans and grammar.
Now, I’m aware that this might seem like a niche concern on a niche platform. “I couldn’t care less!” you might say. But you will then run the risk of being engaged with by American users saying that actually it’s “I could care less”. US/UK grammar disputes are great engagement bait, as is anything to do with Taylor Swift (overrated?); pedestrian crossings; Elon Musk; and baked beans.
Besides, as Threads’s user numbers increase, Meta is at least pretending to care about engagement bait. The company reported this summer that Threads now has more than 200 million monthly active users, which meets Zuckerberg’s original target. X’s numbers remain much higher (368 million) but are by all indications heading in the opposite direction. The web analytics company Similarweb recently reported that X had lost around 2.4 million daily active users in the UK alone in the last year, with a third of them leaving this August in the light of Musk’s enthusiasm for violent far-Right gangs marauding around Britain’s city centres.
The demise of X might seem to present a golden opportunity for Threads to become the default non-toxic “town square of the internet”, as Musk once claimed he wanted Twitter to be. But Meta executives seem aware of the pitfalls of looking too keen to lure in new users. “We’ve seen an increase in engagement bait on Threads and we’re working to get it under control,” said Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram and Threads in a recent Thread. The commenters underneath appear to have his number. “What are the problems? Like and comment for more,” writes one.
Threads presents itself as an alternative to X — but it has its own problems.
The paradox here is that all social media platforms – indeed, all media entities – are in the engagement bait business to a greater or less degree. YouTubers want you to “like and subscribe”. TikTokkers want you to film reaction videos. Newspapers want you to comment and share. It has been repeatedly shown that users engage with content that stirs the strongest emotions: anger, anxiety, humour, excitement, inspiration, surprise. The more clicks, the more advertising money can be made.
Free-floating questions
Threads is particularly susceptible because it offers an entirely algorithmic feed. You don’t see other people’s comments in chronological order and you don’t see people you have chosen to follow. You see what Threads thinks you might like to see based on what you’ve engaged with in the past. Or, to put it another way, you see what Threads wants you to see which is what you’re most likely to click on.
At the same time, it is selling itself as the non-toxic platform, the Good Place, the refuge from the fast-paced, real-time burns of X. Zuckerberg has recently let it be known that he is “done with” politics, having been burned by criticisms from both progressives and conservatives. “The political environment I think I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” he said in an interview last month.
Hence Threads’ peculiar combination of expertly targeted lures about non-time sensitive subjects that don’t matter at all. Political commentary and breaking news barely feature. Free-floating, open-ended questions proliferate: “Name a cover song that’s better than the original.” “Let’s settle the Threads debate. Elon Musk: good guy or bad guy?” It might simply be someone confidently asserting something that’s factually incorrect. It sometimes feels as if Zuckeberg took that famous Oatmeal cartoon about the guy who can’t go to bed because “something is wrong on the internet” and made a multi-billion dollar enterprise out of it.
I’m not saying it’s the worst form of hell. But it does feel like a peculiar purgatory. Once more without feeling. Or perhaps we owe Threads our gratitude. It lays bare the underlying mechanisms of social media so perfectly it just might cure us of it for good.
