Man, Threads is absolutely not shying away from evolving into X Lite (AKA all the vitriol that Twitter already had in abundance before Elon and Trump).

The very comfortable lean into negativity with every reply to just about any post is... pretty damn sad, really. Don't have to go far to find a twat with an optimistic bio and a replies column full of snark.

We have (or had?) a chance here to just shush when a person says a largely harmless thing and our input isn't needed or helpful. Or, hell, you can reply... without snark? 🫢

You could even just roll your eyes and keep scrollin'. Better still, mute or block! You don't need to dive in with the dunk whose only purpose is to add a superiority shot to your dopamine hit.

Yes those posts are public, yes you're entitled to reply, but... why not try not?

To be fair, the Meta team behind Threads is doing its best to encourage all of this behaviour while pretending it isn't.

They've made it clear that engagement is the key metric, so of course people are leaning into engagement bait posts. Likewise, Meta knows most people can't resist taking the bait – so why bother with an obvious tool like Twitter's old Community Notes when you can just leave people to flood into the comments with angry retorts?

Why are we there? When there are easy-to-use options like Bluesky (as opposed to the slightly more complicated Mastodon), why do we continue with the centralised, profit-driven platform?

The same reasons as always: convenience and conformity. By using our Instagram login and social graph, Meta made it easy to join Threads and find your friends. Once you'd found them, why would you leave for a new land where you don't know anybody and your friends won't follow?

It's a mess, but like pigs in shit, we just can't get enough of it. 🤷‍♂️