I got an email yesterday from the social media platform that Meta set up to rival Twitter. Remember Threads? There was a lot of hype and and (if my memory serves me correctly) a hundred million people signed up in the first week.

For all I know, I may have been one of them – I don’t remember if I got caught up in the hype. I certainly haven’t been back if I did – and this is the first time I’ve heard from them.

The email didn’t surprise me. I have other Meta accounts, so they know where to find me. I get a similar email every day from X, as Twitter is now called, pointing out things I might be interested in checking out.

My X feed tends to be heavily weighted towards politics and social issues. I follow a lot of journalists and politicians. The emails from X usually have at least one post that has me clicking. (Should I admit that?)

Threads gave me three posts to click on, things some AI algorithm thinks I might be interested in. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted.

I’ll leave out the names of the posters, but the three posts were:

“Hy, how are you friends”

“Hello”

“Good morning”

I have no idea who these people are, and somehow those words didn’t inspire me to click. I’m sure their friends replied – but what part of the algorithm thought I would be interested in greetings from random people?

This blog gets posted to some of my social media accounts. It is an automatic thing, which means I don’t actually visit the platforms. If I check Facebook once a month that is a big thing.

The drawback is that I am frequently out of the loop. I don’t hear about the health challenges or the vacations because I’m not spending time checking for updates.

My theory is that if it is really important, someone will tell me. That isn’t always the case – people these days assume you are checking social media regularly.

I’m not sure there is a solution. But one thing I do know is that I am not likely to become a Threads user. Not unless the level of conversation goes beyond “hello.”