TikTok takes on Twitter and Threads with textual content posts

“With textual content posts, we’re increasing the boundaries of content material creation for everybody on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in feedback, captions, and movies a devoted area to shine,” a put up within the firm’s newsroom reads.

Whereas it looks like an try to focus on the thousands and thousands of customers disaffected by Twitter’s more and more jarring adjustments, the visible impact extra carefully resembles Instagram’s Tales, with selectable background colors, music and tales to make textual content posts stand out.

Posts have a 1,000-character restrict, in response to The Verge’s testing, which suggests they are often double the lengths of these on Threads or over 3 times these on Twitter (although paid customers can hit 4,000).

One of many ways in which TikTok movies unfold on the platform is by the power for others to remix content material through stitching and duetting, and these are each supported right here. TikTok proprietor Bytedance is banking on these acquainted options making textual content posts simply as viral as their video counterparts, however all the identical, it’s onerous to think about YouTube or Vimeo increasing past their core USP in the identical manner.

TikTok joins an entire host of firms vying to be the default Twitter various — a rising checklist which incorporates the likes of Meta’s Threads, Mastodon and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky. Nothing has but stood out because the defacto successor, with preliminary enthusiasm for Threads waning in current weeks.

There’s a sure irony in TikTok going after the short-form textual content format popularised by Twitter, given Bytedance owes a few of its Western reputation to the platform’s former administration.

Between 2012 and 2017, Twitter operated one thing known as Vine which allowed customers to make six-second looping video clips. Whereas commercially unsuccessful, it was a trailblazer in shortform creativity, and left loads of creatives — and their audiences — in search of someplace that provided comparable. TikTok offered, and its current development has urged that maybe Vine was forward of its time.