Meta's Threads Proves That Social Media Cannot Die - The Atlantic - 0 views
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With great exhaustion, we hereby rehearse the backstory. In 2006, a handful of mostly already successful tech entrepreneurs started Twitter as a weird experiment for posting short textual quips.
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Then, last year, Musk bought it and started dismantling the place. Users longed to recover stability or eschew toxicity, as if those properties had ever really been present on Twitter, a profoundly unstable and abusive place.
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that joy also feels misguided, misplaced, or simply out of time—from an era that definitively ended. The aughties era of universal social-media onboarding that includes Twitter was defined by Millennial optimism and its whoop-whoop soundtrack.
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With a few threads posted, and the most eager followees following or followed, the dopamine high cleared, revealing reality: The age of social media is over, and it cannot be recovered.
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Zuckerberg has merely copied and pasted a social network, and we are back where we started, only with all the baggage and psychological scarring of previous connectivity experiences.
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Big tech companies now dictate where attention, and therefore money, power, and influence, reside. You don’t have to like that fact to admit that it’s the case: Is Threads a thing? Should we be on it? MrBeast has 1 million Thread followers already.
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Who, if anyone, is this for? Did anyone ask for this? Why are these hot people with excellent skin, blue check marks, and 750,000 followers so excited?
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The cascade of new followers, the collective rush of establishing new communication norms on the fly with friends and total strangers—all of that is fleeting. And the true sickos know what happens next: the trolls, the spam, the ads, the Conversations About Politics. Even if those things never materialize, the nagging feeling is still there
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It’s not exactly like rebuilding your home on the coastline after it was destroyed by a hurricane, but the vibe is similar: rebirth and hope, but also regret and dread. If only it had all just fallen into the sea.