They're both bad companies. That's one of the reason's I hate Facebook too, when that experiment was run to try to manipulate people's emotions depending on what was shown on their timeline. Also security and privacy. It's a great way to harvest user data for identity theft. People share too much about their location. I also sometimes got phishing emails that were made to look like they came from friends on Facebook. That wasn't because Facebook was hacked, but I didn't like the association. Maybe a friend's email was hacked, I don't know. I was very selective about who I befriended on Facebook, and on one occasion someone tried to become a friend of a friend for some reason, I guess trying to get a hold of me. Privacy is terrible. Their business is in part selling user data. And Instagram is notorious for making people feel bad about themselves. I didn't like that it was tied to Threads. It was like, don't like Instagram, too bad, you're signing up if you want the Twitter alternative. Facebook already had my email and name, so another division of Meta having it didn't matter.
The cage match thing, crazy things happen in this world so who knows might happen with that. And Italy reportedly invited them to do it in the Colosseum. I assume at least on Zuckerberg's side he knew Threads was launching and wanted to try to get on Musk's good side with jokes. Or maybe it's totally real, it's just so insane to believe, so of course there is a reasonable chance of it happening. Everything since 2016 has been varying levels of crazy.
As for Musk, he's let the worst in the world unleash whatever they want on Twitter now. Where before an indicted human trafficker in Romania was banned, on the new Twitter, I would often see his posts on the main explore page of Twitter with millions of views. Nazis and misinformation run wild. Musk himself freely shares conspiracy theories and is willing to degrade people, sometimes because he thinks it is funny, because he's that kind of guy.
Threads being ready has seemed odd. I think I read earlier today that there was knowledge of a secret project at Facebook in January, but I'm surprised they were able to keep it secret. Then again, Musk has been seemingly trying to torpedo Twitter, or at least that's what it looks like. So he was just begging to have someone create a true competitor. If it was still a publicly traded company, I'd say he must have massive short positions in the stock. Don't know what his deal is. There's a lot of crazy people in the world. He's one of them. But he's determined to go out of his way to give all the other crazy people a platform. There are other platforms for those people already. They know where they are if they want them. I don't know why he has to degrade humanity by pushing all that content on the rest of the general public. It makes many of them less intelligent and believe crazy things. It's now a cult of tens of millions of people and there's no clear path to things ever getting to be more sane. Which is really scary, so I try not to think about it any more.
I did like Twitter for breaking news. Once Threads gets the kind of trending section Twitter has, I'll probably check that daily. Hopefully you won't have to login.
I check Google News throughout the day:
https://news.google.com/
But I like to check, or did, the trending section of Twitter just to be kept more up to date on what's in the public discourse. When something was breaking, Twitter had something before news outlets posted anything on their sites. Twitter was never the best of humanity. But now it's definitely very much as close as you can get to the worst of it. |