Engagement Bait on Threads ⇥ businessinsider.com

Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider:

Let me ask you something: Have you noticed that engagement bait questions are taking over your Threads feed?

Ha! Got ya!

Sorry, sorry. But seriously, I’ve noticed it, too — and I have some ideas about what might be happening.

This is surprising because one would not usually associate a Meta platform with incentivizing all the wrong things. At least it is not going the way of X.

When I asked a Meta rep what the company had to say about how Threads spreads viral content, the spokesperson said: “Replies are one of many signals our systems take into account when determining what posts to recommend to people, but it’s not the most important one. What you see in your For You feed is personalized to you principally based on factors such as accounts and posts you have interacted with in the past on Threads, or how recently a post was made.”

There is no way the recency of posts makes them more visible. Threads prioritizes old posts so often it has become a joke there. Of the ten posts at the top of my home feed right now, none are newer than four hours old, and most are over twenty hours old.

Perhaps I should write something actually intelligent about this instead of snarking, so: it sure seems as though the factors which Threads prioritizes combined with its suggestions-based feeds result in this mess. This is something Notopoulos experienced as her most commented-upon posts found their way outside her typical audience and into other users’ feeds, at which point they received even more engagement. Any algorithm — including reverse-chronological sorting — is susceptible to manipulation. But the ones Meta writes somehow inevitably surface junk.