- Threads, the Twitter-like social app from Instagram, is full of engagement bait.
- It seems like Threads prioritizes comments over reposts or likes, which isn't necessarily bad.
- But it does make Threads easy to manipulate — and I tried doing just that.
Let me ask you something: Have you noticed that engagement bait questions are taking over your Threads feed?
Ha! Got ya!
Sorry, sorry. But seriously, I've noticed it, too — and I have some ideas about what might be happening.
I don't know exactly how the "For You" algorithm in Threads works, but I can make some guesses based on observations and a test I did over the past week using my own account. I'd wager that, right now, posts with a big number of comments are heavily weighted when it comes to what shows up in your feed.
Using comments rather than shares as an indicator that a post is interesting isn't a new idea. (Reddit works this way.) This isn't better or worse, but you can imagine how this ends up making a social platform look quite different from counting likes or shares.
On pre-Elon Twitter, retweets were the main way a post would spread. This rewarded things like the Ellen Oscar selfie, Dril jokes, and sweeping political statements. You want to retweet a funny joke — not reply to it.
But a personal anecdote asking for advice? You're compelled to reply.
I wanted to test this out for myself on Threads. I made a handful of advice-seeking posts that purposely hit on subjects people feel strongly about: tipping, social etiquette, and parenting. Admittedly, my posts also veered into rage bait. I designed them to be so infuriating that people would be compelled to reply and tell me I was an idiot.
On a side note, rage bait is having a moment right now. People have discovered that rage baiting is often the most efficient way to get attention online, and on places like TikTok, where views can translate to dollars, it's a cottage industry. I've seen rage-baiters use it for chaos, like a husband and wife who make TikToks inhabiting the characters of vapid and entitled parenting vloggers who go shoeless on the streets of Cleveland to get the benefits of "grounding" their feet on the earth. I've seen an Instagrammer who recommends small businesses in Upstate New York purposely pronounce "bagel" as "beggle" to enrage viewers and go viral. The most sublime and purely nihilistic rage bait I've seen was someone on X who said that Phish is a right-wing band, sending fans, celebrities, and even a member of Phish into a frenzy of angry replies.
This kind of rage bait is effective and largely harmless. In the best light, it helps us reinforce our norms and feels cathartic to scold someone who breaks them. It's almost reverse trolling, where instead of harassing people, you're inviting them to harass you. (I don't necessarily recommend doing this if you still have part of your soul intact. Mine is long gone, so don't worry about me.)
My experiment in engagement baiting by asking for advice was a success. Almost too successful — as of writing this, I'm still getting replies four days later on a post based on a classic tweet about Swedes not offering food to guests.
A post I made about refusing to buy school supplies was appalling enough to reach the escape velocity of the Threads bubble.
I saw a meme account on Instagram with 2 million followers post a screenshot of it. My best friend, a teacher in the New York City public schools, texted me a screenshot of the Facebook group for the NYC teachers' union where someone had posted the screenshot and said, "This is what we're up against in education today."
I was horrified. Perhaps, I worried, I had gone a little too far.
People who already followed me on Threads, where I usually post about tech news, could tell that I was joking. But for someone seeing these posts in their "For You" feed with no context about me, it seemed real. By the time these posts had spread so far that it was way, way outside the handful of people who knew I was clearly joking, I realized there was no reason for anyone to assume they were seeing some sort of satire. It's not so farfetched to imagine that someone on the internet is a massive asshole; we see that every day. It's not some sly feat to trick people into thinking that entitled jerks walk among us; they do.
This did make me start to wonder if I was, in fact, some other form of entitled jerk. I wouldn't stiff a waiter on a tip, but I certainly would drain attention from someone who was pleasantly scrolling social media. Ah well, the moral implications are for me to work out while staring at my ceiling at 2 a.m.
Rage bait and engagement bait can be rage-inducing but harmless when you come across a single post. But when that type of content is flooding your feed, it's annoying. It's also an easy play for people who seek to profit from engagement.
When I asked a Meta rep what the company had to say about how Threads spreads viral content, the spokesperson said: "Replies are one of many signals our systems take into account when determining what posts to recommend to people, but it's not the most important one. What you see in your For You feed is personalized to you principally based on factors such as accounts and posts you have interacted with in the past on Threads, or how recently a post was made."
Threads has a bonus program where a select group of creators can earn cash payouts for posts with more than 2,500 views. It's not clear exactly who is part of this program, so you can't tell if that post asking for your favorite movie is really angling for a payout from Meta.
I played around with engagement bait because I'm a tech journalist who writes about social media platforms and am curious about how Threads works. Other people do it more seriously, and I wanted to know what they've learned.
So I reached out to Roman Beskostõi, a digital marketing manager in Estonia who is working on a challenge to get a billion views in 30 days for his Threads account. (He's getting close.) He posts multiple times a day to his 50,000 followers and has observed that there seems to be a compounding effect: If one post takes off, the following ones are more likely to as well.
Beskostõi also reminded me of something I completely forgot: the Instagram crossover (which leads to even more context collapse). "If Threads sees that the post is viral and has great potential, then for a greater boost it can start showing your posts in the Instagram feed," he contends. "If you have noticed, in Instagram lately, between photos you can see the carousel of various posts from Threads."
He also uses a well-trod but unsavory strategy: He copies and pastes other people's viral posts.
Threads users themselves may be slightly to blame for why engagement bait is working so well. Threads seems to have a lot of users whose primary exposure to social media is Instagram. Nice, decent, normal people who still retain a shred of human decency and haven't blown out their dopamine receptors from years of shitposting on other, less-savory platforms. The fact that Threads users are not all brain-rotted Twitter refugees is probably a good thing overall! It also means that they're easy marks for engagement-baiters who are pulling out the same tricks they used on other platforms in the past.
Look, Threads is just barely over a year old — still very wet cement. I can tell that tweaks and shifts are being made to how it works. It's also got a user base that's growing. (It's not even globally available yet.) Engagement bait may be taking over your feed today, but by next week or next month, it might be very different — and this phase will be a distant memory.
For now, I promise no more rage bait. Enough people found me on other platforms or wrote me nasty emails that it isn't worth it. My experiment about how Threads works is finished. I'm done. Unless, of course, I think of a really good one.
