As The New Yorker put it in "Meta’s Threads Is More of the Same Social Networking":
Much of what’s on the new social network is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that users have tried to avoid on Twitter.
The experience of using Threads is a bit like being on Instagram if it suddenly prioritized snippets of text over images....
Which triggered the realization "OMG, it has already become whatever the Metaverse was, but on a microblogging social media platform."
See also: "FTX Auditors, Prager Metis, Have An Office In The Metaverse"
First up, the headliner from The Verge, July 7:
Adam Mosseri ran Facebook’s News Feed in 2016, and now he tells Alex Heath that politics and hard news aren’t ‘worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks.’
Instagram’s new Threads app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in a Threads conversation with The Verge’s Alex Heath.
The additional scrutiny, negativity, and integrity risks that come with politics and hard news aren’t worth the “incremental engagement or revenue,” Mosseri wrote. “There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc. — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.” (Mosseri’s strong point of view here is likely informed by his time running Facebook’s News Feed.)
In recent years, Meta has distanced itself from news and politics, including reducing the amount of political content that users see on Facebook. It even dropped “News” from the name of the Facebook Feed last year. The company also responded to a new Canadian law that would require it to pay for local news by saying it will yank news from Facebook and Instagram in the country.
The Instagram boss later clarified his initial response, stating that while Threads won’t “discourage or down-rank news or politics,” it won’t “court” them as Facebook has in the past. “If we are honest, we were too quick to promise too much to the industry on Facebook in the early 2010s, and it would be a mistake to repeat that,” Mosseri said.
While Threads is assuredly a take on Twitter, a platform tying itself in knots under new ownership, Mosseri is apparently thinking much bigger. Following along with his boss, Mark Zuckerberg's statement about finding a “clear path to 1 billion people,” Mosseri said....
....MUCH MORE
Well then, how is it going to survive?
And from NiemanLab, May 2017:
Media: "“Anger is a useful metric” and other evil tips for making money off hyper-partisan content"
From NiemanLab:
Plus: A quick way to make money off other people’s content, an invitation to fact-check U.K. local news, and BuzzBeed vs. BuzzFeed.
“Anger is a useful metric.” NewsWhip, the social media monitoring company, published a report this week on the rise of hyper-political publishers online. From the paper: “There’s a high proportion of reactions to likes for these hyper-partisan pages. The most popular of these has been the Angry reaction. These publishers are highly adept at provoking their followers into selecting a strong emotion rather than just a like.”
Also, check out “the top articles around Fake News across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, since the election in November 2016 through February 2017.” And here’s more about that Google Doc you see on the list.
“The alt-proper.” On May 2, The Los Angeles Times published a story by reporter Jessica Roy: “Milo Yiannopoulos to launch Milo Inc., ‘dedicated to the destruction of political correctness.'” The next day, an article with the same headline appeared on a site called good-kingnews.com, with some strange differences, Roy writes:...MORE
The phrase ‘the alt-right’ became ‘the alt-proper.’ The magazine ‘Vanity Fair’ became ‘Vanity Truthful.’ The Free Speech Movement became the ‘Cost-free Speech Motion.’ Instead of prompting people to follow me on Twitter, it asked people to ‘abide by me on Twitter.’The article was posted on the pro-Trump Reddit The_Donald, where the University of Toronto Ph.D student Ian Dennis Miller, who studies social media and memes, saw it and flagged it to Roy.
Miller’s best guess is that the site [good-kingnews.com] takes articles like mine from legitimate news sites, and then feeds them into something that translates them into another language and then back to English…Tweaking the language of the articles is most likely a ploy to evade Google’s algorithm, Miller said. That makes it seem like the articles originated on that site, instead of being copied from other sources, which can make those stories appear higher in Google’s rankings, meaning more eyeballs on the stories, meaning more ad money....
Very interesting....Here's the rest of that post.
