Compete with Twitter and Threads? TikTok rolls out text post feature

Author: ARIJIT SARKAR, COINTELEGRAPH; Compiler: Songxue, Jinse Finance

Social media giant TikTok has announced a feature aimed at displacing Twitter (recently renamed X) as the text-based social media platform of choice.

Just 20 days after Mark Zuckerberg's Meta launched Threads to compete with X, TikTok has joined the fray, allowing TikTokers to create and post text-based content. The new feature aims to provide users with a platform to showcase their creativity through comments and captions.

TikTok UI for text posts. Source: TikTok

When creating a new post on TikTok, users can now choose photos, videos and text. Unlike Threads and X, TikTok allows for a greater degree of customization to text posts, allowing TikTokers to add features like location and music.

According to TikTok, other features that "make your text content stand out" include stickers, hashtags and hashtags, background colors and saving drafts.

While TikTok has worked hard to differentiate itself from its competitors, Threads has been accused of blatantly copying the interface Twitter has been using for more than a decade. However, the similarities between Threads and X go beyond the visuals.

Threads recently imposed rate limiting to stop cryptocurrency and spam bots.

Adam Mosseri's explanation of introducing thread rate limiting. Source: Threads

"There has been an increase in spam attacks, so we have to be stricter with things like rate limiting, which will mean more inadvertent throttling of active users (false positives). If you fall into these protections, please let us know," explains Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram.