Eric Siu ran an experiment posting ragebait on Threads and watched it blow up. He explains audience capture: creators shape their content for engagement even when it conflicts with what they actually believe. Having a business outside social media helps creators avoid that trap.
I'm running this experiment right now on Threads where I'm just rage baiting everybody. So I just posted to Threads like, huh, how come so many Americans are mad while Venezuelans are happy? 5,000 likes, right? There's a trap that most creators fall into. It's called audience capture. And what audience capture is, and we've talked about some of these people, Neil, is when you start to get a lot of engagement in one area, you start to say things that you actually don't believe and you start to double down and triple down on it. So I think it's a trap that you as a creator don't want to fall into. The good thing for Neil and I is we both have businesses. So it's— I don't— we're not as incentivized to fall into that trap. But you have to, one, understand what platform you're on, but just be careful of the game that you're playing because I'm playing this game right now to see what buttons I can push and to see how much engagement I can get. Plus, it's also for my weekend entertainment as well. But I can confirm that ragebaiting works on Threads. Just be careful of the game that you play.
