Threads and Consequences

March 2026

I’m no big fan of social media, but I do like to lurk (and occasionally post) on Threads. At the time of writing, it’s still a reasonably new platform, and for now it’s full of nice people who want to form communities around nice things. I fear it will eventually go the way of Twitter / X, but for now it’s just…yeah, it’s just nice.

There are some video gaming communities forming in the space, and I’ve found a lot of threads talking about the unintended consequences they've experienced while playing, many of which link explicitly to those discovered in my research. This is heartening, as it does add weight to the unintended consequences I've uncovered, though not from an academic standpoint. No matter: these are real gamers across the world commenting on their real experiences. To me that holds more weight than an academic paper espousing the virtues of playing educational video games. 

I've been collecting relevant threads for a few months, and am aggregating them in the live Google slideshow below. I'll keep collecting and aggregating, gathering grist for the mill and so forth, though I'm not sure if any of these anonymised threads can be used in academic writing.

I think, at this stage, it's just nice to gather evidence that substantiates my research, and that gives me confidence.