Threads users will start seeing a "Trending now" page on the platform
“Trending now is rolling out to the US today so you can see what people are talking about on Threads,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Threads.
Meta tested a trending page on Threads earlier this year called “Today’s Topics.” It appears the company shifted the name of the page to a more familiar name. The “Trending” page has been a staple of Twitter, Threads’ competitor, for years and it’s been highly cited as a missing feature of the Threads platform.
The topics trending on Threads “trending now” page on its first day of launch were: Aaron Taylor Johnson, spring equinox, Bruce Willis’ birthday, Hong Kong security law, and former president Donald Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba. The page appears to link to the most popular topics on the platform of the day.
Meta launched Threads last summer, and it blew up in popularity with 49 million users in the first two days. Then all the hype faded away as many of those millions of people who signed up for the platform when it was first released just stopped using it. Since then, Meta continued to add new features such as a web browser version, a retweet-like feature called reposts, and even an edit button. These new features have made Threads a popular app once again, and Meta said last month that there are more users now than at launch.
Two relatively political topics, Trump’s attorney and Hong Kong security law, were trending on the first day of Threads’ “trending now” feature. Politics are trending despite Meta’s firm stance that Threads is not the place for it. Meta says it will not proactively boost political content on Threads, though the company claims it also will not demote it.
The social media app is still missing a few key features that would make it just like Twitter. There are hashtags on Threads, but they don’t work as well as they do on Twitter and other platforms making it difficult to find everything about a certain topic. Threads also has yet to integrate DMs into the platform. However, Meta seems to be updating the app to make it more like Twitter every couple of weeks.
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