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Have you heard about #Threads? Often, I’ve thought to myself that the only thing standing between me and the best version of myself is a new social media platform to obsess over. And now, my wish has come true.
According to Statista, within two hours of its release, two million users signed up for #threads and within 24 hours, 30 million people were using the new platform.
At the time of writing, there are more than 100 million people using #threads. Clearly, Meta (who already own Facebook and Instagram) was onto something, and the time was ripe for a new social networking app.
Either it’s the next big thing, or millions of people (myself included) were too afraid of being left out of something that they downloaded it out of a bizarre sense of FOMO. For those of you who have in a very cool and aloof way managed to resist the urge to download #threads, basically it’s an add-on app to your Instagram account where people post tweet-like musings, photos and have conversations with each other.
As Elon Musk, a man obsessed with ruining things – electric cars, the good name of the noble Musk Ox, etc – does what he does best and drives Twitter into the ground, #threads has showed up at a very opportune time for those of us with a screen time higher than our bank balances.
Pictured: Threads is "an add-on app to your Instagram account where people post tweet-like musings, photos and have conversations with each other."
My initial observations about #threads are a very confusing mixed bag of contradictory emotions (classic Martha) so I thought I’d lay them out for you here...
First of all, I am quite excited to be in at the ground floor of a social media platform. I was too young for MySpace, and whilst I adopted Facebook and Twitter at quite a young age, they had already been going for several years before I signed up, and then I was (and probably still am) too old for TikTok when it first launched.
Due this excitement I feel about being in early doors on Threads, I can also feel how greedy I am for viral Threads fame. Have I heeded any of the cautionary tales of social media platforms gone by? No! Am I spending hours scrolling through #threads, making myself emotionally dependent on the dopamine rush I get when a notification pops up? Of course! Will I ever be able to extricate my feelings of self-worth from the way other people interact with me online? Probably not!
So far, Threads seems like we’re still on the wholesome, non-hate-speech filled side of the Internet, but who knows how long that will last? And how sad is it that the main discourse about #threads is how nice all the content is, but with the caveat that it’s only a matter of time before it all turns toxic.
Pictured: "So far, Threads seems like we’re still on the wholesome, non-hate-speech filled side of the Internet".
Oh Internet, thou art a heartless mistress. And yet we come back every single time.
Anyway, got to go, I need to post every waking thought I have on Threads!
This article first appeared in Connect Magazine, which you can read in full below...
