Meta/Facebook announced plans to bring Threads to the web in a bid to boost usage.

Just over a month ago, I told y’all Social Media Is Dead.

But guess what?

None of You Believed Me

I wrote my first treatise a week after Threads landed on the scene and 100 million people accepted Instagram’s invite to add Threads to their repertoire of social media apps.

Since then, Threads has struggled to gain consistent usage. 50% of the applications users have rejected the app in the past month.

Meta/Facebook conceived Threads to be a Twitter competitor in an already tight field. Mastadon, BlueSky, and Spill entered the instantaneous message market appealing to different audiences and not gaining traction. Each app has appealing features, and problems.

Either way, none of them have made a meaningful dent in Twitter’s influence. Despite Twitter hemorrhaging users due to bizarre feature improvements and business decisions from the Mind of Musk, these apps continue to struggle.

Threads Lacked Features Users Want

I don’t know if Zuckerberg was rushing to release Threads or pushed against specific features. Threads failed to appeal to instant message users. The app lacked profile edits, post search, a web interface, and hashtags. An app missing hashtags will fail to appeal to modern Internet denizens.

Zuckerberg intends to change all of that by offering a web alternative including those missing features. Meta/Facebook claims Threads’ mobile app will get these features in a series of mobile updates.

In the end though…

Social Media Is STILL Dead

Users flocked to Threads thinking there was going to be a new, and less toxic take on social media, but found a watered down version of the same old same old.

Social media has turned into a cesspool consisting of a few folks trying to share meaningful information, and a smaller and louder group of toxic individuals shouting nonsense into the air.

Social media is either an echo chamber parroting your beliefs, a deserted wasteland if you can gain followers, or a noisy so-called town square where everyone is shouting anything and everyone is saying nothing.

Gone are the days of passively keeping up with your friends’ and family’s events. Ads cloud 75% of the scroll. This forces you to pick your way through to photos of Little Timmy taking his first steps.

The days of engaging anyone in constructive conversations is over. Even the Disney travel groups, a place where people share their magical experiences of the parks and get advice for going there, have dissolved into Left/Right vitriolic shouting matches of wokeness and intolerance.

It’s the Algorithm’s Fault

All social networks engage in a kind of drug dealing. The social media apps propping up so-called social networks imprison you in your bubble and shield you from new ideas and opposing points of view. When you actually do see opposing points they’re introduced through the worst elements of the opposition raising your hackles and sucking you into nonsensical discourse.

This feeds our dopamine addiction on both sides. The sites are giving us more of what we want, while making us feel good by owning the libs, or showing the idiots how ignorant they are.

And it gets us nowhere important.

Truth is variable, and facts are debatable now.

Everything is hard to believe and nothing is real anymore.

There’s no sense of community anymore in social media. The applications have appealed to our basest natures and destroyed our empathy for each other, benefits of the doubt, and patience for understanding.

Social media is dead.

I hope it stays that way.

-MJ

And there’s no way I believe Mark Zuckerberg is writing code for Threads.