The Threads, Meta’s new Twitter rival, How is Threads different from Twitter?
Kari Paul tested the social network minutes after its launch – did it fail to impress, or should Elon Musk be shuddering?
We tried Threads, Meta’s new Twitter rival. Here’s what happened Kari Paul tested the social network minutes after its launch – did it fail to impress, or should Elon Musk be shuddering?
The move is a bold attempt to lure users away from its floundering competitor with a near-clone of the platform. The Guardian tested out the new social network on Wednesday, minutes after its widely hyped launch. Would it fail to impress, or does it spell real trouble for Elon Musk?
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The move is a bold attempt to lure users away from its floundering competitor with a near-clone of the platform. The Guardian tested out the new social network on Wednesday, minutes after its widely hyped launch. Would it fail to impress, or does it spell real trouble for Elon Musk?
How it works ?
Threads offers an eerily Twitter-like microblogging experience.
Opening the app reveals buttons to like, repost, reply to or quote a “thread”, and counters showing the number of likes and replies that a post has received. Posts are limited to 500 characters, which is more than Twitter’s 280-character threshold, and can include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.
Using Threads felt like a fever dream in which Twitter and Instagram had a more usable brain child. The feed was slick and easy to read, though for now it was populated largely with accounts I did not yet follow or care about – perhaps an issue that will resolve itself as more people sign up.
Unlike Twitter, Threads does not seem to use hashtags and does not have a feature that allows users to search for specific text or phrases. It also allows users to share up to 10 photos in a single post – the same limit that exists on Instagram – as opposed to Twitter’s limit of four images.
We tested the app from the US, but it’s now live in Apple and Google Android app stores in more than 100 countries including Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan.
Some have raised the question of a potential culture clash between Instagram and a Twitter-like service. How will our curated, photo-based lives clash with the freewheeling, meme-heavy and often unhinged world of Twitter? So far, it’s strange, unfamiliar – and kind of fun.
So, is it better than Twitter?
Meta’s clone of Twitter does feel like, well, using Twitter. The features – likes, retweets, following – are nearly identical to its longstanding microblog predecessor. However, with Twitter getting clunkier and progressively less usable since Musk took it over, opening an app and actually being able to see and engage with content smoothly felt like a breath of fresh air.
That is a user experience Meta is betting on, openly stating that the chaos at Twitter has made space for a new product on the market. In an interview with The Verge, Instagram’s head of product, Adam Mosseri, said the company felt that recent “unpredictability” at Twitter had created a need for a new platform.
“Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” Mosseri said. “But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”
As a tech writer who has reportedly extensively on the privacy concerns surrounding Meta, the company’s shameless copying of competitors’ apps, and tech’s growing unchecked power, it pains me to say that I actually enjoyed using Threads. I already use WhatsApp and Instagram daily, and have a nearly dormant yet still existent Facebook account. Do I really want to share more of my data with one of the largest tech companies in the world?
Should Elon be worried about Meta’s growing power?
Like many Meta-run products, Threads offers the unsettling experience of integrating almost too well into existing products. Making an account gives you the option to follow your existing circle from Instagram. Your followers will likely receive a notification that you’ve made an account and posted, encouraging them to do the same.
And then there are the longstanding privacy issues. Watchdogs have raised a number of concerns about Threads, as the tech giant seeks to pull even more users into its universe. Threads is able to collect a wide range of personal information, including health, financial, contacts, browsing and search history, location data, purchases and “sensitive info”, according to its data privacy disclosure on the App Store.
How is Threads different from Twitter?
1. A verified account on Instagram can avail their blue badge on Threads. However, this feature is offered on Twitter for $8 per month.
2. Users on Threads, both verified and unverified, will be able to post videos as long as five minutes. On Twitter, users without the blue badge can post a video up to 20 seconds long.
3. Threads users will be given a 500-character count, Meta confirmed. Whereas, Twitter users have access to a maximum of 280 characters.
4. The content rules on Threads, along with controls for muting and blocking accounts, are the same as Instagram.
5. Past weekend, Twitter limited the number of posts a user can read to 600 per day for unverified accounts and 6000 per day for those with a blue badge. There are no such limitations on Threads yet.
6. Threads has been launched without ads. This has been done to engage as large an audience as possible, according to Bloomberg.
7. As Threads is linked to Instagram, you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch when it comes to finding people to follow. Also, the people you’ve blocked on Instagram will remain the same.
8. One cannot send private messages on Threads and will have to head to Instagram to do the same. However, Twitter enables receiving and sending direct messages.
9. According to the screenshots, a user has to press enter three times to start a thread, whereas it can be done on Twitter by clicking the plus button.
10. You can explore what’s on Threads by scrolling through the homepage. On the other hand, Twitter’s homepage allows viewing trending news along with other topics users might be interested in.
