TikTok, the app best known for short-form videos, viral memes and its unnervingly effective algorithm, has expanded into the world of text-based posts.
“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,” a post in the company’s newsroom reads.
While it feels like an attempt to target the millions of users disaffected by Twitter’s increasingly jarring changes, the visual effect more closely resembles Instagram’s Stories, with selectable background colours, music and stories to make text posts stand out.
Posts have a 1,000-character limit, according to The Verge’s testing, which means they can be double the lengths of those on Threads or over three times those on Twitter (though paid users can hit 4,000).
One of the ways that TikTok videos spread on the platform is by the ability for others to remix content via stitching and duetting, and these are both supported here. TikTok owner Bytedance is banking on these familiar features making text posts just as viral as their video counterparts, but all the same, it’s hard to imagine YouTube or Vimeo expanding beyond their core USP in the same way.
TikTok joins a whole host of companies vying to be the default Twitter alternative — a growing list which includes the likes of Meta’s Threads, Mastodon and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky. Nothing has yet stood out as the defacto successor, with initial enthusiasm for Threads waning in recent weeks.
There’s a certain irony in TikTok going after the short-form text format popularised by Twitter, given Bytedance owes some of its Western popularity to the platform’s former management.
Between 2012 and 2017, Twitter operated something called Vine which allowed users to make six-second looping video clips. While commercially unsuccessful, it was a trailblazer in shortform creativity, and left plenty of creatives — and their audiences — looking for somewhere that offered similar. TikTok provided, and its recent growth has suggested that perhaps Vine was ahead of its time.
