Threads and Its Toxic Design

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Threads, for the very beginning was an awful idea. Facebook already has Facebook, Instant Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and more. It was greedy so it created Threads but Threads has one fatal flaw. It’s a web chat driven by algorithms rather than chronological conversations.

The reason for which this matters is that it pushes content that has been seen and interacted by thousands of people, rather than half a dozen. We’re seeing posts that had a thousand comments and five thousand comments. This is not positive for community building because it enforces the cult of personality, rather than a network of friends of friends.

If even twenty people have commented on a post it’s likely that our comment will never be seen. It also means that one person is getting a lot of attention, whilst others are invisible. Threads has the same issue as YouTube. Algorithms push toxic content, rather than interesting content.

This is a critical issue. Several times I wrote something and I expected to be trolled, but wasn’t so I was happy. Yesterday I posted something positive about macs, and less positive about PCs and keyboard warriors and trolls came out. IT professionals that shared their thoughts and experiences are fine, but some trolls came out. My definition of troll is anyone that uses offensive language while bullying us to think like them. If you answer to a troll another one will pile on, and another.

Usually I block those that are negative, but I block and report those that use personal insults. The isssue is not with not being able to handle trolling, but with it being a sustained attack for hours at a time, until the post fades from the algorithms, finally to give the victims of those trolls peace and quiet.

The consequence of yesterday’s troll attack is that I now deleted the Threads app from my phone and I no longer want to open the Threads tab in a web browser.

The situation is simple. I use social media to have fun, and connect with people. When I look at the timeline I see a huge amount of rubbish. I need to sort through that rubbish to find anything of value. When I write something positive it has one or two comments. When I write something that others perceive as negative then I get five, tenn, or twenty comments.

I left Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social networks because I didn’t want to deal with negativity and now I see that Threads is just as bad as the others. This is an issue for me but it is also an issue for social networks.

If social networks want to increase their user base they need to make sure that the experience is positive rather than negative. In the age of AI bullying language should be detected automatically and either flagged, or prevented. A difference of opinion is fine. A personal attack, based on a difference of opinion is not.

It’s 20 hours later and now I don’t feel like using Threads. I don’t want to see that the troll army has piled on the offensive messages while I was away. My ROI as a human being on Threads has been squandered. From 1996-2007, and even beyond trolling on FB, TW, Jaiku and Google plus were very rare. On Reddit and similar sites trolling was normal but I avoided it. Now there are no sites where trolling is not an issue.

Threads should have been built around a chronological timeline with conversations in real time at the centre. By building around algorithms they made it easy for trolling to spread and for hostility to be an issue. I will return to Threads when the trolls have forgotten me and if the comments they left behind are bad, then I will abandon Threads like I gave up on the Fediverse.I want to use Social Media, not Anti-Social media.