I Hate Threads and So Should You

Zuck's Twitter-killer app isn't just bad, it's pointless too.

META Inc/Goatse/Rafi Schwartz

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t feel compelled to think about Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s new “Twitter killer” app that’s turned the chest-beating machismo feud between him and fellow billionaire Elon Musk into, in Musk’s own words, a “literal dick measuring contest.” In a perfect world, I wouldn’t feel compelled to think about Threads the same way I don’t feel compelled to think about Mastodon, or Google Wave, or iTunes Ping, or any of the other many, many social platforms that promised greatness before they slunk back into the digital morass from whence they came. These are not the things I, or anyone else, should be wasting precious brain cells on— not when there are birds and bots and multiverses to ponder. And! yet!

Here we are, just five days since it launched, and already Threads has racked up more than one hundred million signups—nearly a quarter of Twitter’s total monthly worldwide users. By virtue of its sheer force of population gravity, Threads is now squarely in the realm of “things I suppose I gotta give a shit about now.” If a brand new country popped up overnight, and within a week it had more people living there than Germany, you’d probably start to wonder what gives, right? Similar sort of situation here. So, reluctantly, I downloaded the damn thing. And readers, I’m here to tell you definitively and without hesitation: It sucks. It sucks hard. It is a bad app. It demands everything while offering nothing. It looks like ass. It is full of the most uninteresting people you’ve ever scrolled past on Instagram, and they’re all shouting at you at the top of their caps-locked lungs.

“Oh Rafi, you’re such a grouch. It can’t be that bad…”

Fuck you. Eat shit. Yes it can. Yes it is. And here is why.