Meta’s rival to X, Threads, is adding new features that lets users boost visibility of their profile and content with topics, while offering them more control over who can interact with their posts. The first notable change is profile topics.
Users can now add as many as ten topics to their social bio, making it easier for everyone to discover accounts with shared interests. The neat part is that as soon as you click on a topic in another user’s bio, you will be directly taken to their posts discussing the same.
This is made possible, thanks to a new system that lets users add topics to their posts. “When drafting posts, you’ll now see prompts to add a suggested trending topic or one related to previous posts you’ve shared, which will help your audience find your posts,” Meta says in a blog post.
Citing internal research, Meta says posts with a topic tagging alongside perform better at getting more views. Talking about posts, users can now control who can reply or quote-reshare their content.
Threads will now offer a total of four public interaction options for posts viz. anyone, followed only, followed profiles, and mentioned accounts. Users can also set custom feeds as the default view option when they open the app.
Meta is making another crucial change that finally fixes the barebones video playback situation on Threads. The new video player gets a pause/play button, flanked by rewind and forward shortcuts.
At the bottom is an interactive progress bar to let users jump ahead or go back. The bigger change, which finally went into effect earlier this week, is community notes on Threads (alongside Instagram and Facebook), inspired by the feature of similar name on X.
Meta recently announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program and is now implementing a crowd-sourced system to flag problematic content. Essentially, Meta will take a backseat while a pool of contributors will decide whether a post contains misleading or harmful information.
Once there is consensus among the community note contributors, a publicly visible note worth up to 500 characters will be attached to such posts, alongside a relevant link for adding extra context. Testing of community notes on Threads and its sister platforms started on March 18 in the US, with support for six languages.
Notably, if a community note gets attached to a post, there won’t be any disciplinary action or penalty against the post or the account that shared it. “We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces, and to operate at a greater scale when it is fully up and running,” says the company.
