Hanging by a Thread

It's been a year since I joined Threads. I wanted to give myself time to get acclimated, and to give the app time to reach a state of cohesion and maturity before passing judgement and writing a review. Everyone has their own personal and professional reasons for being on particular social media sites, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for any of us. With that said, here's what I think of it so far.

In its early days, there were a lot of people posting about how they felt like Threads was a new school. It seemed like they were trying to find the right cafeteria table to sit at. Some accounts acted like they had appointed themselves the hall monitors of the new school, dictating how everyone else should post. 

I'm not interested in following the edicts of internet know-it-alls.

Threads still has a lot of that hall monitor energy a year later. We are constantly inundated with posts telling everyone what we should "normalize."  

At times, the predominant mindset on Threads can come across as insipid and insufferable. Brilliant people I've followed on other platforms for years get humorless, pedantic replies from users with poor reading comprehension skills. I suppose they're accustomed to the kinds of cliché quotes that are so popular on Instagram, the kinds I made fun of in Meaningless Inspirational Phrase. 

The discourse is often dull. Every week I see conversations that are just relitigating all the same old arguments people once had on Twitter, years ago. And speaking of Twitter...

There is a constant presence of smug declarations about how Threads users are morally superior to anyone still on Twitter. To them, Threads is a place of kindness and love, free of prejudice and cruelty. But I've seen plenty of posts that reveal that assumption to be false and naïve. 

This is a response to a Black user's post about the election

What kind of heartless scumbag would say this to someone who's grieving?

So, as you can see, Threads has given me a whole new crew of obnoxious accounts to block. (And if you're on there, I suggest that you pre-emptively block them, too.) For all of Twitter's numerous and egregious faults, at least Elon Musk hasn't algorithmically suppressed posts about COVID and politics, as Adam Mosseri has done, and that's why I still find it useful.

Threads is a decent place to run into other artists, but has done nothing for my art sales at all. So far it's been worse than Instagram! And speaking of Instagram, Threads is surprisingly not that well-integrated with Instagram. It doesn't seem to get me more views on posts and reels that I want more people to see. I would expect them to be seamlessly embedded, but they're not. Threads had the potential to be a dynamic community for interior designers, but just isn't. My posts about my projects and the things I've seen at various trade shows get little to no engagement. I have the same problem on Threads that I do on Twitter, which is that the posts that get the most attention are the angry ones related to racism or the pandemic, but not my work. 

My latest annoyance with Threads is that it won't allow me to like things. For some odd reason, I get this message whenever I've clicked the like button below several other people's posts in a row.

As you see, they say to let them know if they've made a mistake, but there's no easy way to do that. So what little enjoyment I get from using Threads is constantly thwarted by throttling. 

There is only so much of Threads that I can take. My experiences there have made me doubt the usefulness of social media even more than I already have. And now I'm wondering if it's all just an elaborate way of collecting data to train artificial intelligence. 

And as I've said before, I have no desire to facilitate weird parasocial relationships by constantly baring my soul and telling all my business. But in spite of my many annoyances and disappointments with the platform, I appreciate that Threads has brought new museums and artists into my life. In the free-wheeling early days of the site, the art museum social media accounts were so much fun that I made it a point to follow as many of them as I could, no matter what city they're in. And here are just a few of the many talented artists whose work I may never have encountered if not for Threads:

Alex B Artistry

Athena Cooper

Attasalina

Erin McConnell

Julissa Andrade

Luis Arcadio de Jesús

Myron Fields

Natasha Jenkins 

Tim McFarlane

Keeping up with other people's artwork is one of the main things that keeps me coming back to Threads and Instagram. I find it inspiring. But will the tech world's obsession with turning artists' posts into grist for the AI mill make them reluctant to post their work? Will it drive them away? Will the feeling that we're posting our work in vain cause more of us to give up on Meta platforms entirely as arbitrary algorithms prevent our followers from seeing our posts? It's frustrating, because Threads has the potential to bring us together and help us find more opportunities as artists, but not if we're being shadowbanned by Meta's weird rules or ripped off by Midjourney and ChatGPT. I don't know what the future of Threads will be, so I'm trying to just take it a day at a time and enjoy the possibilities, but that's very hard on an app that won't even let me like things.