NYC Threads: Where Irony Goes to Die

(WARNING: This is a piece about making New Yorkers mad, and when New Yorkers get mad, profanity ensues. That's just how it is. You've been cautioned.)

In April of this year, I went to New York to do a speaking engagement at Hunter College, and to film content for a couple of videos. One of my ideas was to film in and around the nation's busiest transit corridor, the Lexington Avenue Line (basically, the 4-5-6 from 125th street all the way down to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall), and to talk about everything it does for the city, and what life might be like without it. Specifically, I wanted to imagine a world where New York solves its transportation problems like just about any other U.S. city: by trying to build enough roadway capacity to accommodate all the travel demand. (You can watch the resulting video here.)

For the rhetorical approach, I wanted to lean into a sort of Swiftian A Modest Proposal construction: basically to propose something absurd and horrific (the replacement of the Lexington Avenue Line with enough lanes of roadway to replace all the transit trips) as a way of illuminating and considering actual policy discussions we're having in America right now. (The federal government declaring transit dirty and dangerous, and putting a halt on all capital grants, among other things.)

I had a blast making the video, and actually gave a sneak-preview walkthrough of the work in progress at the Hunter College event, and...it kind of killed. People vibed with the absurdity of the argument I was making — they understood where I was being ironic, and where I was being dead sober.

Release Day

So when I finally produced and released the video a couple weeks later, I did as I usually do and posted a teaser on my Instagram the morning of release day:

These kinds of posts mostly just reach people who already follow me, understand my point of view, and have sarcasm detectors that work within a pretty normal range. Pretty typical like-to-comment ratio; nothing out of the ordinary. What I'd forgotten, though, is that I have my Instagram set up to cross-post to the app's evil cousin (OK they're probably both evil), Threads. This is where things went fully off the rails.

481 replies! That's good, right? Well, if you're of the "any engagement is good engagement" school of thought, buckle up, because New York Threads is about to thoroughly disabuse you of that notion.

Not All Threads Users

Now, I don't generally post to Threads because, well, I have pretty limited time to spend on social media apps and, the honest truth is, I've never once opened that app and not found it excruciatingly boring after about 30 seconds of scrolling. It's just not my thing, but no shade on you if it's yours. It's not an indictment of your critical faculties if you happen to be a Threads power user. In fact, there were even a couple cases of people genuinely understanding my post:

Yes! A video thumbnail showing an enormous roadway paving over hundreds of blocks of Manhattan should be a pretty good tell. And there were actually a few people who clearly don't know my schtick at all, but had enough awareness to suspect that I might not actually be making an earnest proposal to replace the Lexington Avenue Line with 60 lanes of arterial roadway:

Regarding the second post, I don't think satire and ragebait are really the same thing, but I give them a bit of credit for guessing something might be amiss. The first one, though? It didn't even turn out to be an "or." It was satire...and I was about to get annihilated by "NYC Threads," a community I had no idea existed, but was about to become intimately familiar with.

Welcome to NYC Threads

Most of the replies, unfortunately, were from people who detected no irony whatsoever. Mostly, they had one burning, all-consuming question:

It's funny, until precisely this moment, I'd never once in my life pictured myself as a Batman villain, but now I can't unsee it.

So yeah, there were a bunch of extremely funny replies along these lines. But also, some of the responses were just...I guess "low effort" is the term I wanna use. Can we please just permanently retire the following sentence construction?

Although the idea that I'm "Gen Z" is pretty funny, like, you DID look at my profile pic, right? Also, I do appreciate that someone was able to jump in on that last one and set them straight. HE COVERED HALF THE CITY WITH A ROAD, which is probably the funniest thing in this whole saga, zero likes. What's the proverb? A poorly considered Threads post can travel halfway around the world while a sensible reply is just lacing up its shoes?

People explain urban planning to me

Here's something I probably already knew, but that this whole Threads experience made abundantly clear: people like to explain things to strangers on the internet. In my case, the following are just a few things New Yorkers wanted to educate me on:

• Heavy rail transit is good and is what makes a city like New York work
• Widening roads doesn't solve traffic and it destroys cities
• Robert Moses is a relevant cautionary tale, and I should probably read up on him
• I'm weak, weird, and annoying, and the flannel shirt I'm wearing in my PFP is especially off-putting

In a way, it's heartening that there are this many NYC Threads users who know enough about Robert Moses to invoke him here. Don't come for my profile pic, though, it's cool and you all know it.

Incidentally, nobody asked for it, but the Dutch have takes:

Jeez, are you also going to change it into a city with bland food (except the Indonesian, which is tasty), a trashy red light district, and a populace full of people with the most insufferable personalities known to man? I'm not saying that isn't a good tradeoff for high quality bike infrastructure, but I'd still have to think about it. (Kidding, I love the Dutch.)

Who's paying me?

Some people were so incensed, they couldn't think of any other explanation than that I'm in the pocket of Big Car.

In my DREAMS I run a YouTube channel that attracts car dealership sponsor money. Those are serious paydays. I shill for ultra-specialized transportation data providers and Australian companies that make fanny packs out of recycled water bottles. Clearly I'm in the wrong content niche.

Just look at that PFP — I guarantee you this dude was EXTREMELY pleased with himself after he clicked "submit" on this banger. Also, I don't really see any reason why I couldn't be in the pocket of the automobile industry AND have someone chauffeur me in and out of Manhattan, those options aren't even remotely mutually exclusive. Mostly I just like the image of me making the content I do while secretly observing the streets of New York from the back of a Range Rover, periodically asking the driver to slow down so I can snap pictures out the window.

FOH

Famously (well, famous to me), retired NBA player and former Knick Carmelo Anthony, when he pulled down a rebound, would shout out, "Get the fuck out of here, I got it," but manage to reduce the whole phrase to about three syllables. And as I read through a lot of the Threads replies, which I mentally categorized as a subgenre — labelled "FOH" — I just started hearing everything in his voice.

I kind of like the concise ones (yes, I was the fourteenth heart on melanymovez's contribution), but it's also funny when they get so mad they lose the ability to capitalize appropriately and keep control of the spacing between words. Also, I don't know what to say about "focus on drainage plans" other than it's extremely funny.

Defense Readiness Condition 1 Activated

A lot of what was in the replies I just chalked up to normal, run-of-the-mill lack of an irony detector. But some of it just got very dark, incredibly quickly. Seriously, what is it, exactly, about the internet that makes people choose the least charitable interpretation of something possible, and then immediately go to the most extreme, DEFCON 1 response?

Wildly uncharitable? Sure — but at least they had the good manners not to question my parents' contraceptive choices:

I'm not trying to say people on Threads are inherently stupid. Irony can be hard to pick up on, and it can certainly be hard to execute well. If it's too obvious, then it isn't funny; if it's not obvious enough, people will take you literally and be mad about it. I'm not even immune — for example, I've been looking at this next one for hours and I still don't even know if this person is being earnest or not:

I have a pretty thick skin. I can handle the worst NYC Threads has to throw at me, but please, for the love of all that's good and pure, leave the world's finest dining establishment out of it.

Maybe being ratioed is actually...good

Often, having a high proportion of replies to likes is a sign that you've said something very dumb on the Internet. And in this case, a lot of the replies are extremely funny, but here's something I don't want to get lost in all this: being ratioed by people who understood me to be saying the exact opposite of what my intended meaning was is, strangely, very satisfactory. Look at these:

This just a small sample of this particular genre of reply. And I don't even know what other conclusion I could possibly reach but: yes, these may be people who were born without any semblance of an irony detector, but they are people who understand their city correctly. OK, fine, I'll give you some more:

I don't even know if what I did qualifies as a fallacy of composition, but there's no doubt the Threads app is absolutely teeming with master logicians, so...maybe? Tough to say.

The Lucky 10,000

None of what I've presented here is meant to imply that the people who ratioed me are idiots. Irony is context-dependent. People who run into my content for the first time, out in the wilds of the Internet, are often put off, and they never come back. My stuff is an acquired taste, apparently, and I'm consistently shocked that enough people stick around long enough to acquire it.

So, just being charitable about how the entire Threads episode played out: you probably aren't going to realize that I don't ACTUALLY want to pave over half of Manhattan unless you're familiar with my tone and style. That's fine. I get that. What actually irks me is that there are THIS many people who clearly care about their city, who value transit, who take all the right lessons from the Robert Moses era — who obviously care about all the same things I care about — but have never seen my content at all! I think this reply sums it up best:

As is often the case, Randall Munroe said it best. So, let's just raise a toast to those 10,000, and I'll try to do my part to make amends by (1) disabling Threads cross-posting, and (2) posting the xkcd comic for posterity. Enjoy.