Threads "Mystery Mention"

About a year ago, Threads by Meta launched. It was met with an enormous influx of users initially, and then. things quieted down. Many people were quick to opine that “Threads is dead”, but I, like a crazy person, stuck with the platform and continued to post on it daily. Over time, something funny happened, my following there outpaced my Instagram following.

Threads staying power and slow upward tick is a testament to how powerful Meta as an organization is. They were able to successfully cross-sell millions of users to a new platform through nudges on Instagram.

As a regular Threads user, it’s an easy product for me to satirize. Some of the diehard Twitter (X, whatever) fans who read this newsletter might not be as familiar, but it’s simply a nice app to use. Their design team crushed it. Anyways, one of the things I try to check on both Twitter and Threads are my mentions. It’s good to know when someone is specifically trying to get your attention. Often, finding an old mention, especially after a wildly viral concept, leads me on a wild goose chase.

This got me thinking… what if this was a feature, not a bug? One can imagine a world where Threads has a “Mystery Mention” feature where you get notified that someone, somewhere mentioned you. This would kick off a scavenger hunt for the content.

I wonder how many people would be able to find this if they received this notification. If you have a small following, it’s reasonable that you could dig through a couple hundred people’s recent posts, but as someone with nearly 500k+ followers across platforms, this would be a chore.

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