Threads, engagement and hate on social media

They say on Threadsthe Twitter clone launched by Mark Zuckerberg on July 6th, yes an engagement problem: in practice there are also many subscribers, over 150 million, partly thanks to the fact that if you are already registered on Instagram, you just need a couple of clicks to access; but users are inactive, post little, comment less. I wonder if this story of engagement isn’t getting out of hand: if having made this metric the measure of the success of a digital service really leads us towards a better world. I thought about it reading the thousands of comments that Young people he received after his bad bike accident in the Dominican Republic: an accident that he himself recounted live with his smartphone, from the emergency services to the surgery on his femur and collarbone. Many have commented, expressing affection; but too many have instead written their enjoyment, have celebrated, have exulted. They spewed their hate. Here, in technical terms, that livor is also counted as an engagement. They are active users who participate and who therefore create value for the social network that hosts them (their data) and thus contribute to its success. It’s kind of what happens in the economy with the GDP, the gross domestic product, which is the main measure of the state of health of an economy: it indicates how much is produced and it doesn’t matter if you build schools or prisons, if your products pollute the air or make it breathable, if funerals or baptisms increase; what matters is to produce and sell. For years, there has been a debate about whether GDP can no longer be the main metric of a country’s state of health, a measure of citizens’ well-being. I don’t think engagement alone can tell us if a social network makes sense.