How Threads is the New Twitter
With Twitter tottering on the edge of collapse, Meta introduces a Twitter-like platform called Threads
Over the past few months, the news on social media platforms has been highly revolving around Twitter’s evolution after Elon Musk’s takeover.
Despite the fact that numerous Twitter platform users had left upon hearing about the change in leadership, many stayed to see what would happen with Twitter.
For a long time, Twitter was slowly growing its audience compared to Facebook and Instagram. But TikTok was a significant rival for it in terms of platform users.
However, Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, recently announced that Twitter would participate in applying limits to how many tweets users could view in a day.
This provided a gap in the social media platform realm, which Meta quickly filled with its platform called Threads.
On Thursday, July 6th, Threads launched earlier than Meta had predicted to help fill the void Twitters users needed.
The platform was quickly flooded with millions of users, who claimed it was a breath of fresh air.
The platform works similarly to Twitter with a rolling feed, profile dashboard, and the ability to share and comment on posts, attach links and photos, and create thread posts (similar to Twitter Threads). The platform doesn’t seem to rely on hashtags yet, but there are still many more features yet to come to the platform. And users are eager to see what is in store.
Here is what the profile section looks like:
The activity and notifications:
The home page:
Despite the normal hesitation of navigating a new platform, celebrities, news outlets and more were creating accounts and nicknames for thread users. Some platform users were calling themselves thread heads, threadies, and more.
What is there to like about Threads?
If you hold an Instagram account, your Instagram followers immediately appear on a page asking if you want to follow them on Threads as well.
It works very similarly to Twitter, which makes it easy to navigate if you know Twitter.
At the moment, it won’t stay this way forever, there aren’t any ads bogging down your feed.
Threads focuses primarily on Text-based posts, meaning that if you want to create a thread where you teach someone on it, you can do so. For example, if I want to create a Thread on How to Market a Book, I can create a long thread of text on how to do so.
What are the cons to Threads so far?
You can’t take your Twitter followers there. So far, Twitter users who are leaving Twitter to Threads have spoken about the downfall of this problem.
At the time of launch, there hasn’t been a separate direct messaging application on Threads. But, if you need to tag someone, you can type @ and their username, and they appear quickly.
Your homepage feed to still controlled by an algorithm. This means that the Threads algorithm picks from people you have chosen to follow and shows you the ones you will most likely be interested in.
Many users are still concerned about information privacy as Meta has had trouble with this in the past with Facebook.
As far as an alternative for Twitter, Threads may be the best yet until BlueSky becomes officially available.
However, only time will tell.