Is Threads Good For Gaming News?

To cut a long story short, the answer is a resounding no – but only for now.

Before we get too much into this topic, it should be said that this is probably an answer that is probably relatively unique to each of us. Depending on how your feed looks – perhaps influenced by what you used Instagram for – you might have a very different answer.

But the point remains that you’ll not be able to use Instagram’s (and Meta‘s) new social media platform for gaming news consistently. You can’t dig out news. If it’s there in your feed, you’ll see what it wants to show you. But aside from that… zilch.

This isn’t great news, because the platform would actually be quite cool for gaming discussion. It has a forum-y feel to it that is quite nice. And while it doesn’t have ads, it’s a pretty cool place to be.

It’s not without its issues. Chief amongst them is the seemingly random feed. You don’t see people you follow without changing settings. This does create a community of ideas in a way – you see things you wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise. On the other hand, you see things you wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise.

Look, I miss the days of the Wild West Internet. I miss hopping on a chatroom and being surrounded by anonymous weirdoes who had a billion different opinions. Unfortunately they also had a billion different racial slurs.

And Threads looks set to be a safer version of that. You are surrounded by ideas and you can choose which to interact with. And when I can boil that down to gaming, or photography, or food or – whatever – I can stop getting sport in my feed.

Or maybe the algorithm knows me better than I know myself.

Threads for Games News

So despite only really following gaming brands today, I’ve only seen a couple of gaming related posts. And they were effectively advertising that I wouldn’t interact with. Game Pass is amazing. We get it. Move on.

But when Threads introduces a way to narrow down that category so that I can see when people are posting about video games, it feels like it will be a great place for gaming news. It’ll have the access to developers that Twitter has, with the in-depth discussion of bigger forums. In theory. All within a fairly usable and nice looking shell. Without ads, I should repeat. Zuckerberg says they won’t be coming until they start approaching a billion users. Do you believe him? I certainly don’t.

But for now it’s nice, and it’s kind, and it’s fun. There’s an element of discovery to it that is pretty good fun. But I wouldn’t download it expecting to have discussions on specific topics. It’s the flavour of the week, and we won’t know if it’s really worth downloading for a while now.

You know what it really needs? Really toxic console warriors. Yeah – now that I think of it, that’s the only thing that’s missing.