Let me catch you up quickly.
Three posts ago I noticed my Threads engagement had dropped by 30x overnight. I built a script, pulled 30 days of my own data, and found the pattern. Part 1
A Meta employee commented on LinkedIn saying it lined up with what people inside the company already suspected. Part 2
Then I posted about the whole thing on Threads, and Threads gave it zero views for 25 minutes while the page refused to load. Part 3
So. Here's the tool, ready for you to use.
github.com/tanyapowell/threads-suppression-tracker
It's a CLI. Node.js, no dependencies, MIT licensed. You give it a Threads access token, it pulls your last 30 days, it tells you which of your posts are sitting below half your median engagement rate. That's it. That's what I've been running on myself.
If you want to see the live version on my account, the tracker page is here. I moved it to a 90-day rolling window so the sample holds up over time.
How it actually works
Quick version. The script grabs your posts, calculates a median engagement rate, and flags anything sitting below half of that with more than 100 views. The 100-views filter matters. Low-reach posts can look like suppression when they're just normal variation. The interesting signal is the ones that got distributed and then throttled.
The README has the long version. Run it with npx threads-suppression-tracker if you want to try.
The thing I didn't expect
Somewhere between Part 2 and Part 3 I started posting less on Threads. Not as a protest. The platform kept making the case for itself.
My util page /stats shows the shift. I'm writing more here and less everywhere else.
I keep finding more of this. This week I remembered I owned an old domain from 2016 and redirected it to here. Deactivated a Medium account I hadn't touched since 2016 either. Tightened up the plumbing on this site so it actually works the way it should.
None of it was planned. It just kept making sense once I could see what I was looking at.
Your turn
If you want to run it, the repo is here. Raise an issue if something breaks. DM me if the data gets weird.
If you're a journalist or researcher and want to pull apart how it works, I'm around.
And if all of this is giving you permission to stop posting on a platform you don't like? That's allowed too.
The repo. github.com/tanyapowell/threads-suppression-tracker The investigation. Part 1 The data. Live tracker
That's the series.