Meta’s threads are picked up by the Engagement Lure

Using comments rather than shares as an indicator that a post is interesting is not a new idea. (Reddit works this way.) This isn’t better or worse, but you can imagine how this ends up making a social platform look quite different from counting likes or shares.

On pre-Elon Twitter, retweets were the primary way a post spread. This rewarded things like Ellen’s Oscar selfie, Dril jokes, and huge political statements. You want to retweet a funny joke – not reply to it.

What about a personal anecdote that calls for advice? You are obliged to answer.

I wanted to test this for myself on Threads. I’ve done a handful of posts looking for tips that intentionally touch on topics that people feel strongly about: tipping, social etiquette, and parenting. Admittedly, my posts have also turned into anger bait. I designed them to be so annoying that people would be forced to respond and tell me I’m an idiot.

On a side note, rage baiting is having a moment right now. People have found that anger-baiting is often the most effective way to get attention online, and on places like TikTok, where views can translate into dollars, it’s a cottage industry. I’ve seen those who anger use it for mayhem, like a TikTok-making husband and wife inhabiting the personas of insidious, entitled parent vloggers who walk the streets of Cleveland shoeless to reap the benefits of a- and “ground” the feet on the ground. . I saw an Instagrammer recommending small businesses in upstate New York intentionally pronounce “bagel” as “beg” to piss off viewers and go viral. The most sublime and purely nihilistic rage baiting I’ve seen was someone on X saying that Phish is a right-wing band that sends fans, celebrities, and even a member of Phish in a frenzy. angry responses.

This type of anger bait is effective and largely harmless. In the best light, it helps us reinforce our norms, and it feels cathartic to scold someone who breaks them. It’s almost trolling in reverse, where instead of harassing people, you invite them to harass you. (I don’t necessarily recommend doing this if you still have part of your soul intact. Mine is long gone, so don’t worry about me.)

My engagement bait experiment asking for advice was a success. Almost too successful — as of this writing, I’m still getting replies four days later to a post based on a classic tweet about Swedes not offering food to guests.

A post I made about refusing to buy school supplies was awful enough to hit Threads bubble escape velocity.

I saw a meme account on Instagram with 2 million followers, he posted a screenshot of it. My best friend, a public school teacher in New York City, texted me a screenshot of the New York City Teachers Union Facebook group where someone posted the screenshot and said, “This is what we face in education today. “

I was terrified. Maybe, I worried, I went a little too far.

People who already follow me on Threads, where I usually post about tech news, might say I’m kidding. But to someone seeing these posts in the “For You” feed without the context of me, it seemed real. By the time these posts spread so far that it was well beyond the number of people who knew I was joking, I realized there was no reason for anyone to assume they were seeing some kind of satire. It’s not that far-fetched to imagine that someone on the internet is a massive jerk; we see this every day. It is no crafty feat to deceive men into believing that self-righteous scoundrels walk among us; they do

This made me start to wonder if I was, in fact, another form of entitled bastard. I wouldn’t stiff a waiter with a tip, but I would certainly distract from someone who was scrolling pleasantly on social media. Well, the moral implications are for me to work out while staring at the ceiling at 2am

Rage Bait and Commitment Bait can cause rage, but harmless when encountering a single post. But when this kind of content floods your feed, it’s annoying. It’s also an easy play for those looking to cash in on the commitment.

When we asked a Meta representative what the company had to say about how Threads spreads viral content, the spokesperson said: “Replies are one of many signals our systems consider when determining which posts to recommend to people, but it is not the most important. What you see in your For You feed is customized for you primarily based on factors such as accounts and posts you’ve interacted with in the past on Threads, or how recently a post was made.”

Threads has a bonus program where a select group of creators can earn cash payments for posts with over 2,500 views. It’s not clear who is part of this program, so you can’t tell if that post asking for your favorite movie is actually looking for a payment from Meta.

I played with the commit bait because I’m a tech journalist who writes about social media platforms and I’m curious about how Threads works. Others are taking it more seriously and I wanted to know what they learned.

So I got in touch with Roman Beskostõi, a digital marketing manager from Estonia who is working on a challenge to get a billion views in 30 days for his Threads account. (Coming.) He posts several times a day to his 50,000 followers, and he’s noticed that there seems to be a compounding effect: If one post takes off, the next one is more likely to.

Beskostõi also reminded me of something I had completely forgotten: the Instagram crossover (leading to even more context collapse). “If Threads sees that your post is viral and has high potential, then for a bigger boost, it can start showing your posts in your Instagram feed,” he claims. “If you’ve noticed on Instagram lately, between photos you can see the carousel of various Threads posts.”

He also uses a well-trodden but unsavory strategy: copying and pasting other people’s viral posts.

Thread users themselves might be a little to blame for why engagement bait works so well. Threads seems to have a lot of users whose primary exposure to social media is Instagram. Nice, decent, normal people who still retain a shred of human decency and haven’t blown their dopamine receptors from years of posting crap on other, less palatable platforms. The fact that Threads users aren’t all brain-rotting Twitter refugees is probably a good thing overall! It also means they’re easy signs for engagement baits that pull the same tricks they’ve used on other platforms in the past.

Look, Threads is barely over a year old – still very wet cement. I realize there are tweaks and tweaks being made to how it works. It also has a growing user base. (It’s not even available globally yet.) Engagement bait may be taking over your feed today, but by next week or next month, it could be very different — and that phase will be a distant memory.

For now, I promise I’m no longer baited with anger. Enough people found me on other platforms or wrote me nasty emails that it’s not worth it. My experiment on how Threads works is over. I’m done. Unless, of course, I think of a really good one.