The Importance of Engagement Bait

Greetings from Read Max temporary HQ in Downeast Maine! This week’s newsletter is an experiment: A podcast, featuring my old friend Katie Notopoulos, who was, briefly, the editor-in-chief of Meta, Inc.’s “Threads” product.

Katie Notopoulos is a former Buzzfeed News writer and host of the late lamented Internet Explorer podcast, but for the purposes of this show her most important qualification is that she is one of the finest shitposters to grace the contemporary internet. Katie (as she explains in the episode) now also has the honor of being the first person to ever be “ratioed” on Threads, after she claimed to be the “editor-in-chief” of the Threads platform and was shocked to find that a significant number of people actually believed her.

We discuss that episode, and more, on the podcast. Some selections:

On the Threads celebrity/meme account land grab

I think what’s happening across all the celebrity accounts, all the meme accounts, is that there is, like, intense engagement. It’s a land grab right now. Obviously, like, if you're JLo, and you had -- I mean, I don't even have a sense of scale, of how many hundreds of millions of fans she had on Instagram, [but] a large portion of those will port over, right? But also, because it's only an algorithmic feed right now you have a very good chance of getting in front of anyone's eyeballs if you get enough engagement juice. So there's just tons of this engagement bait stuff going on with like, open ended questions.

On Threads as next hope for celebrities who can’t make it on TikTok

I have this theory that those kinds of celebrities who had quit Twitter long ago, but they're not quite TikTok celebrities -- someone like a JLo, or Paris Hilton, who are kind of stuck in the Instagram era. Those people also skew slightly older, but there are a lot of celebrities who are just not TikTok celebrities, because that's its own special skill set. You have to be, like, funny and weird and really authentic on TikTok in a way that, other than Will Smith, I don't think any mainstream celebrity has really [achieved]. You know, like, the Kardashians aren't really big on TikTok, right? Like, they're very much Instagram celebrities. And I think that those people probably know that Instagram is sort of declining. People who have made a lot of money and are very attuned to these social things can tell that the winds are changing. And so if there's a new platform, especially if it's going to be more tied to their Instagram, even if text is not their, like, best format, they're like, Yeah, let's pump it, let's go, like, gotta cling to this. Like, it's, they're seeing this as sort of like a life raft off of Instagram, or to keep the Instagram juice going. Because otherwise they're gonna fade into irrelevance when TikTok takes over everything.

On making history on Threads

One thing that I found really interesting about the experience was that a key feature that does not exist on Threads is you can repost -- essentially a retweet or quote tweet -- but you don't see that count, and you don't get notifications about it. So when you have something like this post that went viral I could see I was getting a lot of replies to it, but I could not see how it was spreading. And that's a very interesting, weird dynamic when you're trying to figure out a piece of content that's very specifically like this. If you've ever had something that goes weirdly viral on Twitter, and you're like, Huh, what's going on there? Usually, you can kind of figure it out by like, oh, well, I see that this one really big account retweeted it. […] And you can't even totally figure out how successful [it is]. It becomes that likes are the only metric for success, which... I mean, I'd like to give myself the credit here of believing that I am the first person to be ratioed on threads. […] It's a little tricky, because without that retweet count I don't totally know. I do know that I got more replies than I did likes.