TikTok, a social media site that is popular for its addictive video content, announced recently that it is now allowing “text-only submissions,” thus making it the newest tech behemoth to provide an alternative to Twitter.
The move comes as a pleasant surprise for social media fanatics, as it comes right on the heels of a Twitter backlash after Elon Musk issued a limit on viewable posts on the app. Musk’s social media company stated that it is setting temporary limits on posts in a bid to address ongoing challenges with “data scraping and system manipulation.”
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The text uploads on TikTok will be most similar to comparable content on Instagram, which earlier this month also unveiled “Threads” to also rival Elon Musk’s beleaguered “X” (formerly known as Twitter).
Contrary to Facebook’s parent company, however, TikTok opted to incorporate the new text-only functionality within the existing app rather than releasing a new product like Meta did with Threads.
TikTok’s version will also remain more visual than a Twitter or a Threads post, with users able to add a color background, music, as well as stickers to their post.
The video streaming platform said that this option is meant to assist creators in broadening their options as they share ideas and express their creativity.
According to the Chinese-owned corporation, the new format will help broaden the “boundaries of content creation for everyone using TikTok” while drawing further on “creativity”, as can be seen in the captions and comments.
“With text posts, we’re expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space to shine,” the company said in a statement.
In addition to Threads, smaller platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Substack Notes have also come out as potential competitors to Twitter — none of these apps, however, have been able to dethrone Musk’s social media app despite its current problems.
Earlier last week, Musk claimed that Twitter already lost about half of its advertising revenues, giving its rivals a chance to partake of the marketing pie.
For its part, TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance and now has over 1.4 billion monthly active users, currently enjoys the same advantages as Meta-owned Threads. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.