may 20 okc
If you've been reading this blog for a bit you'll know I occasionally bring up Threads, Meta's attempt to compete with Twitter after Twitter started sucking hard by, essentially, building (a version of) Twitter with a heaping tablespoon of (a version of) Reddit.
For what it's worth, Threads offers a pretty decent posting and reading experience. The communities (mine include NBA Threads, WNBA Threads, and Blue Jays Threads) are generally good (even though the sports ones are stuffed with casuals) and overall the community at large is generally comprised of normal people. And most of those normal people seem to understand that this one can't get wrecked like the last one.
This said, I do not really participate in the broader culture of Threads because I really only have time and energy to use it to exclaim things while watching basketball games. What kinds of things? See here, here, here, here, and here.
As you may have guessed, there are various Threads main characters and various Threads dramas (and villain origin stories, and public floggings of noxious people). The main Threads drama going on right now is very interesting and crazily compelling, but not necessarily for the best reasons.
TL;DR: A writer, KWB, who seems like a nice and kind person met a guy while abroad, and that guy became her boyfriend, and their relationship got serious, and she posted a lot about their relationship on Threads. Recently, the relationship ended. As I understand it, he cheated.
Anyway, that's not the thing.
The thing is that, like, hundreds of people have felt compelled to weigh in on this other person's life, and relationship, and heartbreak. They weighed in on it along the way, and, now that the relationship is over, they're offering their $0.02. And, like, maybe that's fair play because of the public nature of the whole thing, but, as the public nature of the whole thing articulates a larger point about how social media users develop parasocial relationships to strangers and their stories, the thing, to me, has started to resemble how people talk about their favourite shows.
This is one of the many reasons the social internet is both wildly compelling and completely fucked up.
To be clear, we're talking little opinions and full-on reaction posts (and videos) both positive and negative in nature. And then there are the reactions to the negative reactions (and videos). Then there are tangents and side conversations about things like feminism, privacy, bitterness, loneliness, the price of social media fame, and so on. And then there were the tangents and reactions to the side conversations. And so on, and so on, and so on.
It's been really, really interesting to watch. KWB's experience —— both as a main character (and to be clear, she's a great character and, again, seems like a really nice and kind person) and as a woman who has been hurt and is grieving in a public way —— is an interesting example and microcosm of the various universes we build and destroy every day in both our offline and online lives. We are all gods in our own small ways.
More to come. Maybe.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch sleeb
🌳 grass sleeb
🌷 now sleb
Be good to yourself.
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