By Ezra Butler — 09 Feb 2026

Moneyballing Threads

I ran an experiment on Threads to see if I could get 1M views in a month. I achieved my goal after 4 days.

Over the past week, I've received more than 1M views of my posts on Threads.

This is not an accident. I purposely wanted to get more than 1M views in a month to highlight issues I had identified with Threads algorithms. I was able to accomplish in roughly 4 days what I thought would take me a month to do.

I'm using the term "Moneyball" in the title not because I earned enough money to buy a capuccino here in Italy, but because like the film MONEYBALL, I combined the results of all these experiments together to get me over the finish line. (If you look at all the activity surrounding this post, you'll understand better.)

These views are completely meaningless. Yet, it is the main metric which is highlighted by Threads, which would make someone assume that it has some relevance and value. It doesn't.

As you will see, I was able to get the 1M views using old tweets of mine, which outperformed what they should have. The larger issue at hand is that during the same period completely organic posts of mine received fewer than 300 views, and in some cases, fewer than 100 views.

View counts are wholly controlled by an algorithm. As you will see, it can choose to show a post to tens of thousands of people, or to tens of people. There is virtually no correlation to my follower count. It all seems very arbitrary.

And that is a problem.

Reposting Tweets

Between 2008 and 2022, I tweeted more than 63,000 times.

For the majority of the time, I used Twitter as a whimsical diary of moments removed from context. Recently, I downloaded a searchable archive of my tweets, and for fun, decided to post a few screenshots on Threads. And I noticed something very strange happen.

Nearly every time I would post a screenshot of a tweet, it would rack up thousands of views. There would be almost no interactions, likes or new followers, just views.

I began to do mini-experiments, like creating a screenshot which looked like an authentic tweet, but was not. The algorithm only showed it to roughly 60 people. It was as if the Thread's algorithm considered my tweets content worth sharing, which I hypothesized that the Twitter data was likely content the Threads algorithm was originally trained on.

Typical Organic Reach

Most wholly organic posts I would create on Threads would received anywhere between 50 and 600 views. Even if they received actual likes from people within minutes of posting, it didn't seem to change how many people would be shown my posts.

I have roughly 1900 followers, so there isn't really any correlation between my follower count and how much any single post is likely to be displayed. There also isn't any correlation between one post and another. Even if I have a post which is shown more than 10k times, it doesn't mean that the next post will be shown more than 30 times.

Previous Viral Activity

I know the effect that a single authentically viral Thread could have.

A few months ago, I had a thread which went "viral", with authentic engagement, in which I included a list of a dozen newsletters about the history and language of color which I had written over the past two years. The first post of the thread received more than 72k views, 2.5k likes, 130 comments, 303 reposts and 125 shares. From that thread, I got more than 1000 new followers and more than 100 new newsletter subscribers, including a single new paid newsletter subscriber.

It was in reaction to Pantone's announcement of their "Color of the Year", so I admittedly played into the Zeitgeist.

That should have informed the Threads algorithm that people may actually wish to see my research and newsletter-related posts, but no such luck. I did not see any real change in the reach of my research, even though my newsletter opens still remained nearly constantly in the 60-70% open rate, which I'm told is decent. Which indicated to me that than even though I added a significant amount of readers, the same percentage of people were actively looking at the newsletters in their inboxes every week.

I was achieve to get some organic traction, on occasions, for purely pithy posts, as I would assume, but posts which were actually about my research or curiosity would still receive no reach.

Why do I care about "views" as a metric?

There are two very good reasons.

The first is that Threads has decided that it is an important metric, which makes it an important metric.

The second is that it shows how much Threads completely controls the potential success of any single post. Simply put: If no one is shown a post, there is very little probability of anyone seeing the post.

And everyone on Threads seemed to have their own theories and opinions about why some things get traction.

The Experiment

I decided I wanted to get 1M views in a month, and see the effect, if any, it had on literally anything else.

Would it increase the amount of followers? Of newsletter subscribers? Of people spending a few dollars on the illustrated book for adults I had written a few years ago? Would it increase my organic views in any way?

This past Wednesday, I messaged my friend Leah to make the experiment official. At that point, I had roughly 300K views in the rolling 30 day calendar. My goal was to reach 1M in a rolling 30 day calendar.

I have to admit that there has never been a point of my time on the internet which I have enjoyed posting anything less. I knew that using screenshots of my old tweets would yield outsized view counts. What I did not know what that if I "quote-posted" a non-performing organic post with a screenshot of an old tweet, it would jumpstart the view count of the non-performing organic post.

Results

Within 4 days, I had 1M views in the previous 7 days period.

I don't know who is being shown these posts or what they are using them for. But it doesn't feel very kosher or real. There is no real engagement. There are the numbers, and that's basically it.

My top post with 226K views is, ironically, an organic post "I wish the algorithm would understand whimsy."

But that post did not start really taking off until I "quote-posted" with an old tweet about my telling a stranger that he lacked whimsy.

Compared to the other posts, these had relatively high "engagement".

Was this a success?

I didn't want 1M meaningless views any more than I wanted Threads to only show my posts to a very small percentage of the people who chose to follow me.

On Twitter, I was able to be me, and to keep a nearly 14 year record.

Were there times when I had more engagement and times where I had less? Yes.
Did my style and content evolve through the years? Yes.
Did I ever feel like it was the platform which forced me to change what I was doing? No.

I changed to develop my own voice, to pursue my own interests. I was conscious of my audience.

The problem is, in order to even access one's audience on Threads, you have to get through the algorithm. And if you successfully game the algorithm, you are not being your authentic self. Therein lies the problem

What point am I trying to prove?

1. I wanted to show is that, however odious the process to me, I was able to do it. And I didn't have to steal anyone else's IP to do it. Everything I posted was my own intellectual property, meaning, my decade-old tweets are still my thoughts.

We have this idea that "content" becomes stale after 24 hours, as the algorithm incentivizes people to post relevant "content", and as I've noticed, the views simply stop growing after 24 hours. It is incredibly difficult even to find one's own content a week or two after posting.

2. I understand how the algorithm is broken, and therefore I understand how I am able to manipulate the broken algorithm. If all I cared about was online metrics for pithy statements, I would simply lean into a very specific genre of post, and would get all the views I wanted.

3. None of this would have any effect on my follower count, newsletter subscribers, pay-what-you-want sales of my pdf of THE ELEPHANTS UPSTAIRS, any of my other posts, or my happiness, for whatever that's worth.

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4. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, that is meaningless. I want to share my enthusiasm for research, discovery, experimentation, and curiosity. I want to highlight my whim and whimsy. And Meta-owned platforms like Threads, Instagram, and Facebook have shown that they do not.

This is the one of the reasons why I'm working on CVRIOVS. If you would like to build your own inexpensive independent site, please learn more below.

Examples

I'm not saying that my posts are necessarily good.

But they are me.

Flirting in Italian

This is authentic engagement.

Life Story

A respectable 2.7K views and 133 likes.

Gluten-Free Pastry

Take a look at an organically "viral" post, which racked up an impressive 6K views, together with 17 like, and 6 comments.

Ten days later, I quote-posted a screenshot from Twitter, from the time I smuggled illicit gluten-free baguettes from Strausborg to Baden-Baden, strictly for personal use. It racked up 66.2K views in less than a day.

Even more, it increased the views of the original post from 6K to 125K. But with the increase of 119K views, it did not receive a single additional like.