TikTok will now look a little more familiar to Twitter users, on the heels of Twitter’s baffling rebrand to “X.”
As Twitter — sorry, X — continues its slow downward spiral into internet garbage, TikTok announced a new text-based format for posts. On Monday, the social media company announced text as a new post option alongside the existing formats for posting photos, videos, and livestreams. On the camera page, you can now choose text as an option, type out a post, and customize it with sound, stickers, backgrounds, and other features that come with video or photo posts. The announcement didn’t specify a character limit, but according to The Verge, it’s up to 1,000 characters.
It’s practically impossible not to mention TikTok’s announcement in conjunction with Twitter’s rebrand. Over the weekend, Elon Musk replaced its iconic bluebird logo with an X-shaped logo and made the domain name “x.com” redirect to the Twitter site. A seemingly never-ending series of unpopular changes — like removing legacy verification and setting daily limits for users — has been a plush opportunity for other social media sites to entice users away from the changing platform. A few weeks ago, Meta launched Threads, which amassed 100 million users in the span of a week. But engagement waned once users found that it lacked basic features. Now, TikTok appears to be the latest contender as the best Twitter alternative with its new Tweet-esque post format.
TikTok currently has over a billion users worldwide and is the most popular app amongst Gen Z. Is this the secret formula to take the crown as the official Twitter killer? Based on the internet’s short attention span, we should know very soon.
