The market for social media is indeed very competitive, new trends fly by so quickly in creative ways to fight for the consumer’s time, content, and most significantly data, whether explicit or inferred. As a pioneer in sharing thoughts publicly that can influence politics, human rights, and more, Twitter held the lion’s share for over 2 decades. However, after its late acquisition by Elon Musk, a serial creative in futuristic entrepreneurship, it seems the time has come to challenge Twitter’s existence. After all, no one has a monopoly on user’s time to express their thoughts through messaging, even if Twitter pioneered this practice.
To me, it remains unethical though to copy paste someone’s idea, even if that idea is few decades old and you might improve on it. However, the world of business doesn’t run on ethics as much as it does the law, and Mr Zuckerberg understands this very well. Unless there is a trademark or copyright, it’s a free country to execute and profit. Below are the main differences you will find in threads:
You can post bigger content
One of the dual positive and negative about twitter is its character limit. Threads sees Twitters 240 character limit and – almost- doubles it to 500. Imyself am a wordy person, so this works well for my type of people. Similarly, videos are limited to 512MB and up to 2 minutes, 20 seconds on Twitter, while Threads bumps the ceiling up to 5 minutes.
You need an Instagram account to sign up
Even though Threads runs on a separate platform, and you need to download the app separately, you will require to login though an Instagram account. This allows the gigantic number of Instagram users to add themselves to Threads in matter of seconds. This also means new users tcan build on their existing following on Instagram, find their friends and favourite accounts easily, while also keeping away the accounts they blocked on Threads.
Posts do not show in chronological order
Unlike Twitter’s, Threads does not use the conventional chronological order to display the posts by default, instead it uses an algorithmic that prioritizes relevance and engagement to shape users’ content consumption, interaction, and overall experience. Whatever attracts the user to keep engaged! This can be dangerous however, as it can end up flooding your feed with original posts that come from people you don’t know.
Threads can only be accessed on phones
Well most of us spend a good part of our social media time on our phones, so it makes sense that Threads launched to be a phone only application. Whether this is just a phase and will expand to using websites or this is by design for another reason, whether legal or based on research and experience in the field, this will not be a problem in the way of Threads expansion.
No limit to the content users can see
Threads offers users unlimited daily post consumption which comes in contrast to Twitter which recently introduced unforeseen restrictions, allowing users a maximum of 600 posts per day, with those on a paid-monthly subscription limited to 6,000 daily posts.
Threads does not have subscriptions or bookmarking at the moment, however as it is in its infancy, we might see more advancements in the upcoming months.
What do you think? We are interested to hear your opinion on the matter, and your initial feedbacks on Threads.
