I feel what you feel, and I agree with the dehumanizing comparison, but it is what it is. I just can’t understand the mentality of the herd because it highlights a completely different set of priorities from that of good social media environment. So I hold that comparison to all its negative contempt.

Threads comes up with minimal advertising and people join it without really caring what it does and how well it does. It comes with many of the same usability and content discoverability issues that Twitter had on a its worst of days. The hierarchy of sponsored content vs follower content vs follower interaction vs follower-of-follower content vs whatever the hell further down this clown parade Threads openly does is just completely whack. And it is still just as obfuscated as the rest in terms of being favored by its algorithm, plus monetization of content is a complete question mark. And yet people still join, and not any random person, but the every-person and the famous and the political. AOC herself ignores Mastodon and makes up an excuse, but is on Threads day one.

And Why? Why join a mediocre, underbaked, and by the numbers platform that basically doesn’t even innovate on the previous one? Because of the promise.

The promise it could be “The Next Big Thing”.

Not saying I’m above it. Not saying there’s superiority in standing to opposition to this or anything. For every thing I care about here, there will be many other things I don’t and where I frustrate someone. But it still does make me overall more jaded about the world regardless.

In fact, I’m tempted to say I WANT people to know I’m not the one downvoting them when I disagree.