Going Viral for a Ghost

Over on Threads (Twitter-like social network, owned by Facebook / Meta), a few months ago they added a feature called "ghost posts" that's a lot like Snapchat or Instagram Stories in that anything you set as a ghost post disappears after 24 hours.

How to ghost post

It's not completely intuitive, but it's also not a wildly confusing experience to me.

What's been a revelation for me over the last couple of days is how non-obvious what a public Ghost post is to a lot of folks using Threads.

How a ghost post looks in the timeline

To my eyes, it looks like a regular post with a dashed speech bubble around it. It doesn't look like a direct message sent to just me, but I can also understand that it's a bit confusing in terms of what it is and who can see that post.

And based on the responses I got to a random, silly Ghost post I wrote yesterday, it's very confusing to a lot of people.

Up until yesterday, if I got any sort of reaction to a Ghost post of mine it was maybe a like or two and the odd bot DM'ing in response. But yesterday I posted something I've done in the past to generate a conversation around podcasts on other social networks to minimal response:

It took a couple of hours, but eventually responses ranging from "Sure!" to "Ok!" started rolling in from all sorts of accounts. Initially I tried responding with a quick "Sure - what would you want to talk about?", but I was very quickly overwhelmed by the amount of people responding. And then realizing that a lot of them were either bots or some sort of scam account.

But even the ones that seemed mostly human were confused and thought maybe I was messaging them directly to do a podcast.

I don't think this is necessarily these people's fault—if they are humans—it's the fault of the Threads interface that makes it confusing enough that people don't see it for what it is.

Following your ghost post

One other neat but kinda weird feature of Threads that I wish other social networks would pick up on, is when someone follows you Threads will tell you if it was based off a specific post. I assume it just tracks if someone tapped in to view or reply to a post and then clicked the follow button from there.

I'm amazed that 159+ "people" followed me based off that one ghost post. That seems like a pretty flimsy reason to start following someone. 😆 I feel like I can only disappoint from there.

No, but do you wanna do a podcast?

As a way of dealing with the volume of responses, I just deleted most of the requests in my inbox that looked even vaguely sketchy or non-human. Then for the ones that seemed possibly real, I copied and pasted a canned response to direct them to a Google Form to sign up if they were actually interested in being on a podcast. I also posted it publicly on my Threads account.

Hey 👋 if you’d like to be a potential guest on a Talking to Threads podcast I might do, just fill out this form and I’ll get back to you if it goes ahead. https://forms.gle/figa5o8xzhuxGPFn7

I don't know how many people I sent that message to—possibly 100+?—but as of right now, 7 folks sent in some amount of information. I'm still not sure if it's a thing I'll actually do. Maybe if it gets to 10? I kind of love the thrill of trying to have a conversation with a stranger from the internet, but by the same token I don't love trying to arrange a recording time with a stranger from the internet.

Anyone want to sponsor a 10 episode run of "Talking to Threads" experiment? 😜