14 Comments

Some brief searching suggests that Richie Rich's major burden was that he was so nice and charitable that nobody, rich or poor, ever believed he was acting in good faith, and assumed he was working some angle. So I guess the parallel here is that no one believes Zuck is going to behave honestly with Threads just because of his history of doing bad things and suffering no consequences.

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Thanks for reminding me why I never watched this movie. 😁

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hah; I had avoided it for a long time!

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People actually think billionaires are sad? Really?

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yep.

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It's a great film. It may be myth - it may be whitewashing the general corruption of billionaires - and, it's a very well made film with a skilled screenwriter and director showing their skills. That said, the characterization of Threads as Instagram influencers without pictures is only true if you don't actually do anything with it after showing up. My initial feed was full of banal crap that I wouldn't dream of spending time with. To deal with this, I tracked down all of the political people I followed on Post, raided their "Following" lists, unfollowed all the people that the "Hello, you must be new here" Instagrammy algorithm offered, the algorithm stopped bugging me and my experience of Threads is pleasantly identical to that on Post. I enjoy the same political content that I used to enjoy on Twitter, minus the fascists. Threads is reportedly refining the algorithm so that you won't get slammed like I was with crap when you first show up there. You can criticize Zuckerberg for being Zuckerberg - no argument there - but it's not really fair to criticize Threads as a medium if one hasn't actually tried to use it.

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It's a professionally made, slick Hollywood film. To me, that doesn't make it "great". I don't particularly like that style of slick filmmaking to begin with, and the intellectual vacuity, combined with apologizing for billionaires, really puts me off. YMMV in this as in all things, obviously.

I'm reluctant to go on threads because of the massive privacy violations, in part. "You can't comment on threads without giving Zuckerberg you're info which he will exploit" doesn't seem like a fair standard, imo. You don't need to get hit in the face to know that you'd prefer not to be hit in the face.

I'm glad you're having a good experience there, though.

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Fair enough on both counts. I confess to having surrendered my sense of privacy and autonomy to Google and Meta long before I even realized that was happening. (Shrugs fatalistically)

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Yeah. I may end up on threads eventually. It sounds like it's a level worse than facebook's other products though, which is why they're not making it available in the EU.

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Hadn't heard that it was worse, and that's a bit daunting. I can't tolerate Facebook at all, and there's certainly no reason not to believe that all Threads needs is time and tweaking to become as bad as FB. For the moment, though, once you tweak it, it's currently quite pleasant and inobtrusive-seeming. I really enjoy your writing on Substack and Notes and would love to see you there, but I can surely respect your reasons for hesitation. You're actually one of the first people I sought out there when I downloaded the app. Honestly, I'm there solely to see the maximum number of people I like to follow in the same location, plus the few fascists that have popped up there are easy to block.

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Gah, maybe I should get on there. Just feel stretched thin on other networks already../

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Also you can’t get on on the web; it’s all through the app, which is not my preference...

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